EN
The aim of the article is to study the mechanism of creating grotesque in Roman Jaworski’s collection of short stories titled Historie Maniaków (Stories of Madmen). The analysis of the structure of Jaworski’s work (plot, character construction, metaliterary passages) has shown that the contrast between the figure of fulfilment and its degeneration is the semantic category which constitutes the grotesque world of his stories. Meaningful with regard to ontology, epistemology and axiology negative categories such as nothingness, deformation or ugliness, within the historical-literary context function as an opposition to dominant at that time poetics of symbolism. Simultaneously, they become an expression of the typical of modernist awareness crisis of the subject, and of the doubt in the cognitive and representative potential of language.