EN
The paper deals with the problem of irony and its meaning in Mazepa - Juliusz Słowacki’s drama and Gustaw Holoubek’s fi lm. It also analyzes the intertextual aspect of Słowacki’s play and its impact on the film.Mazepa is an example of a work characteristic of Słowacki’s dramas, which was created in relation to the tradition of the baroque theatrum mundi fi lled with Romantic irony. Calderon’s problem of “life as a part to play” and the duality of man and the world appears in the work as a condition for ironic self-knowledge: that of the hero and the poet who shapes the drama. The specifi city of Słowacki’s irony can be viewed in comparison with the concept of irony of German romanticists (F. Schlegel, Novalis), and in the context of Victor Hugo’s poetics of the dramatic grotesque.In contrast, the fi lm adaptation of Mazepa (1975) directed by Gustaw Holoubek is based fi rst of all on tragic irony extracted from Słowacki’s play. Emphasis is placed on the motif of fatal divergence between the deeds of the heroes and the effects of those deeds(heterotelia). Holoubek tried to read the tragic irony in Słowacki’s drama in the symbolic order. However, the symbolic reading cannot be fi nal. The irony of Słowacki’s text makes the meanings and interpretations of the fi lm open-ended.