The overview, presented in the article, of opinions by historians of Polish literature about Witkiewicz’s writings about the Tatras, especially his flagship work — Na przełęczy [On a Mountain Pass] — clearly shows that most of them, comparing Witkiewicz’s oeuvre to that of other Polish writers at the time, appreciated his artistic and social significance, his role in building readers’ sensitivity to the beauty of the Tatra landscape, to the exoticism of the culture of Podhale highlanders. This seems to be the central idea of fragments of these studies cited in the article as examples. In addition, all of them — indirectly or explicitly — point to the untypical structure Witkiewicz’s book of the Tatras, hindering its genological typology and making it impossible to unequivocally assign it to a specific kind or genre of literature.
Marian Antoni Maurizio-Abramowicz (1905–1996), agronomist engineer by training, skier and mountaineer by avocation, left Poland in 1939 and in 1942 settled in Spain, where he lived until his death. He spent his childhood and youth in Zakopane, where he moved in the local intellectual and artistic circles and among Podhale highlanders. Fascinated with the beauty of the Tatra landscape, highland folklore and the unique mental aura that emerged from this foundation — of the world of the mountains and people of the mountains — he cherished vivid memories of this throughout his stay abroad, memories strengthen by frequent visits to his homeland. He expressed this in his writings — poetry and prose. His oeuvre can be an excellent example of temporal transgression referred to the constant crossing of the boundary between the present and the past.
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