Czy Jan Tomasz Gross jest „wampirem historiografii”? Analiza metodologiczna „Sąsiadów”, „Strachu” i „Złotych żniw”

The article is a methodological analysis of three studies by Jan Tomasz Gross (Neighbors, Fear, and Golden Harvest) and an attempt to reconstruct this scholar’s professed ideal of historical science determining the sense and goal of his cognitive activity. In the debates on those books the main disputes were over their factual level, leaving methodological issues aside, which were very seldom commented on. However, each of the three books in question can and should be a pretext for discussion on theoretical problems in historiography. The author of the article examines Gross’s methodological postulate which defines his ”new” approach to sources, his manner of understanding historical truth, the narrative language, and the proposed method of “dense description” as a way of solving the problem of translating episodic knowledge into general knowledge.