The purpose of the article is to reconstruct polemics about Jan Józef Szczepański’s literary debut, the short story “Buty” (The Shoes), published in Tygodnik Powszechy (1947, no. 6). The analysis of Szczepański’s answer to the readers’ objections and to Kazimierz Wyka’s review leads to conclusions that this controversy helped Szczepański to rethink the tasks of literature and to under-stand his own role as a writer. At the time of his debut, Szczepański formulated a programme of creativity based on the truth of his experience of evil during the Second World War. This programme did not match the readers’ expectations, as they were hoping that a writer dealing with a wartime subject would take up the myth of Good and Evil, which justified a national code popular in Polish literature, i.e. “the holy fight for the homeland.”
