The paper examines the special historiographic evidence: the lost last book of the well‑known Polish historian and methodologist Professor Jerzy Topolski entitled “New Methodology of History”. Only its working outline in the form of an extensive table of contents has survived, but this does not prevent the author from making interesting hypotheses as to its meaning.
The article deals with the problem of a metaphor in non-linguistic media of communication (visual arts and music). In contrary to the opinion that such a metaphor is not possible (for the sake of its purely linguistic character), art historians and some musicologists do interpret certain artworks as metaphors and are significantly successful with their efforts. To solve this dilemma a new concept of metaphor is being proposed, based upon Noam Chomsky’s idea of degrees of grammaticality and Jerzy Topolski’s suggestion that this idea may be used in such a way.
The place of the history of historiography in Topolski’s comprehensive oeuvre has not been subjected to a holistic analysis yet. I will try to highlight some of the key topics rather than propose an exhaustive interpretation of them The article concentrates on the analysis of both the notion of historiography itself, as well as interpretation the main historiographic work of the Poznan historian.