Alegoria w „skrzydłach ołtarza”: Herling-Grudziński, Benjamin, de Man

The article juxtaposes the diptych of short stories by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, The Tower and Pieta dell’Isola, with the theories of allegory developed by Paul de Man in The Rhetoric of Temporality as well as by Walter Benjamin in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The analyses reveal several points of convergence in the structure and motives present in the works by Grudziński and in the texts by these critics. In the case of Benjamin, this would suggest his influence on Herling, whereas in the case of de Man, it reveals a parallelism of thoughts of the two contemporaries working with different genres and different interpretative communities, yet developing very similar conceptions of the text as well as of the man.