This volume deals with the idea that literature has somehow to do with what is familiar and but also with what is foreign to us and – in essence – through descriptions and insights that come from what is near, it explores in depth distance, in terms of space, time, andotherness. In this kind of literary space and time travel, the critical essays contained in this book (ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century) mark - as points de repére - the progress of one of the many themes of modernity, from the beginning of the perception of otherness down to a recent past, trying to locate the frontier between distance and proximity, in some of the crucial moments for the definition of contemporary culture. The subjects of the various essays involve different literary cultures, the Italian, the Polish, the French, the Russian ones, as seen through a comparative method. The essays range from sixteenth century Polish memorialsts writing about the Turk, to the story of the life and the literary fortune of a sixteenth’s century Polish heretic and scholar at the Muscovite court - through the evolution of Polish facecja of Italian origin, seen as a moment of confrontation two neighboring but essentially different civilization. The great theme of utopia is dealt comparatively, highlighting the convergences between two great seventeenth-century writers, S. H. Lubomirski and D. Bouhours, and the Enlightenment utopian J. Krasicki, forerunner of the great ninteenth and twentieth-century dystopias. The secular utopia of the redemption of man is analyzed in the various aspects of poetic discourse in the works of some of the greatest poets of modern and contemporary Poland and in twentieth-century theatrical culture.