ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that in its march across the European continent in the late eighteenth century the Gothic did not withdraw when it reached the gates to Europe's East and that the Eastern Europeans did not prove resistant to this growing aesthetic fashion. Anna Mostowska began penning her first Gothic stories at exactly the time when the understanding of the architectural Gothic was transforming, when it started to be seen as a channel for expressing the cult of national past. The history of Polish translations of English Gothic romances of the first stage is very meagre and begins only in the third decade of the nineteenth century, with Ann Radcliffe remaining the translators' favourite. The chapter focuses on the dissemination of the Gothic to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a vast multicultural state partitioned by its neighbours in 1795, and for over a century erased from the maps of Europe.
