Abstract

The shift towards the biographical writings that is noticeable on the Polish market leads to a broader reflection on the genre. There is not and there cannot be any canonical pattern of writing a biography, and text materials, especially in recent years, greatly expanded the repertoire of varieties of the genre. The example may be Uchodźcy of Henryk Grynberg and Good Night, Dżerzi of Janusz Głowacki. The idea of the first one is based on the original concept of "writing for someone" that questions the definitional status of autobiographism and also the determinants of biographism. An unusual literary treatment can be seen as a variation of apocrypha - "unwritten" the book of already died Marek Hłasko that Grynberg writes. However, in the case Głowacki, standing up to the biography of Jerzy Kosiński turns out to be a dangerous exorcism - the starting point is Kosiński and the last point is the author himself. The formula of "a biography rather than an autobiography" is emerging. Both proposals meet on the common ground of narratives made as novels.