Biblioteka jako przestrzeń poznania

The article is a study of the ways of interpreting the image of the library in Józef Kallenbach’s short story Przygoda bibliotekarza (The Adventure of the Librarian, 1888). The presented examples demonstrate the multi-dimensional meaning of library as an intellectual problem and cognition space. The author shows Kallenbach’s points of view concerning library as a motif which helps to pose questions about convention and conception of realism and, as a consequence, about Kallenbach’s view on culture. The present discussion also sheds light on a few important texts which create a context to analyse the short story by Kallenbach. Intertextual allusions can be helpful in understanding the main problem presented in The Adventure of the Librarian. The paper focuses on the meaning of the library as a graveyard as well as on dream and onirism as a literary convention which expresses the possibilities of cognition and asks what realism in Polish literature of the end the 19th century in Kallenbach’s case actually is.The article discusses the aesthetic differentiation of the library in the short story The Adventure of the Librarian by Józef Kallenbach and the painting Der Bu¨cherwurm (Bookworm) by Carl Spitzweg. The author tries to prove that The Adventure of the Librarian could be an epic ekphrasis to Spitzweg’s painting.