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‘A spectre is haunting Poland, throughout its thousand-year history: the spectre of truth’. This book explores the fate of truth in modern and contemporary Polish culture, beginning with Romantic sources and moving through twentieth-century philosophy and the country’s leading authors, artists and intellectuals. Alfred Jarry set his *Ubu Roi* ‘in Poland, that is to say, nowhere’. For more than a century, Poland has been erased from maps, colonised and reduced to a geopolitical non-place. In this land of uncertain borders, occupied by totalitarian regimes, the truth has never been a certainty, but a commodity under siege, just as in the poet Zbigniew Herbert’s famous *Report from the Besieged City*. After all, the truth is like health: we only realise its importance when it is already too late. And in Poland, where political health has long been lacking, the quest for truth has become a strategy for survival. This was the case for Mickiewicz and Norwid, for whom truth is the product of struggle and constant approximation, and later for many other intellectuals whose lives and works Luigi Marinelli recounts – artists, philosophers and writers who were persecuted, insulted and exiled. For all of them, truth is redemptive and protects against the lies of corrupt and ruthless powers. This is why it is worth re-reading the heretic Witkiewicz, or Tarski, who found refuge in the precision of mathematical formulas whilst his parents were being deported to Auschwitz. This is why we must remember Gombrowicz, for whom life is shaped by engagement with others, or Herling, a victim of the Gulag and a pilgrim of freedom. This is why it is essential to know poets such as Miłosz, Herbert and Szymborska, or writers such as Lem, who, through science fiction, anticipate the threats of the future.