Piotr Olkusz and Dobrochna Ratajczakowa’s Polish Enlightenment constellation not only discloses the processes contributing to the construction of modern Poland, but also how, in the atmosphere of postwar hopes, many Polish scholars focused on the eighteenth century, visibly expressing animosity towards the Romantic paradigm dominant in prewar Polish culture; it was much easier to set functionalism and political involvement against traditionalism and nineteenth-century realism in an atmosphere backed up by declarations of objectives shared by authorities. Ratajczakowa links the theatre and the press as crucial processes of social transformation from the broader public sphere to ‘concrete audiences present in physical places’, and shows how Wojciech Bogusławski and dynamic forms of audience reception in the late eighteenth century paved the way for a highly politicized and engaged forms of spectatorships in the twentieth century. Olkusz charts the clash between public and national theatre, articulated in the dialectical tensions between the Enlightenment outlook and the Romantic paradigm.