Regular readers of Words without Borders will remember Otto Bohater, the downbeat Warsaw detective, and his faithful partner, Watson the White Rat, who appeared in an extract from Essence in 2007. Their further adventures are described in Romanticism, a thrilling horror story in which the spirits of Poland’s greatest Romantic artists–the composer Frederic Chopin, the artist Jan Matejko and the poet Adam Mickiewicz–are brought back to life with dire consequences. As these bloodthirsty vampires hypnotize people with their art, words, and music and lure them to their doom, Otto the detective has to save the day, using the pointed stakes of signs banning just about everything to pierce their evil hearts. The only trouble is, Otto was a duffer at school and is no intellectual, so he doesn’t know that Chopin’s heart was buried in an urn in a central Warsaw church, and isn’t in his body . . . At this earlier stage in the story, the Minister of Culture appears on television to announce the resurrection of the three Romantics.