The stories in the collection “Shadows” are written by the remarkable Polish writer Kornel Filipowicz (1913–1990), a master of the short genre, one of the largest prose writers of the 20th century. The collection was published posthumously in 2007; it was compiled by the writer’s wife Wislawa Szymborska, a famous poetess and Nobel Prize laureate. This book, writes Szymborska, tells about “those whom the author knew personally, with whom he was connected by many years of friendship or just one minute, extracted from the bottom of his own or other people’s memories. All of them have long been in the kingdom of shadows, accessible only to literature.” The action of Filipowicz's stories takes place in Poland at different times - both wartime and peacetime - over half a century, the characters are Jews, Poles, Germans, their psychological portraits are expressive and accurate, which, in particular, helps to understand the nature of the ambiguous relations of long-time “neighbors”.