There is a phrase in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain that prompted Pavel Hülle to write an entire novel called Castorp. This phrase - “Left behind are the four semesters he (the main character of T. Mann's novel, Hans Castorp) spent at the Danzig Polytechnic ...” - is included in the epigraph. Hülle lives in Gdańsk (Danzig until 1918). This beautiful ancient city is a full-fledged character in all his books, and it is not surprising that from his youth, according to the writer, he “invented” the events that happened in his homeland with the hero of “The Magic Mountain”. P. Hülle’s novel is like a chapter missed by T. Mann: Hans Castorp’s experience on Danzig soil shocked the impressionable young man and changed a lot in him. The author set himself a difficult task: his Castorp had to correspond to Mann’s image, but at the same time the story could not be allowed to fade in the shadow of the great German’s book. And Pavel Hülle, according to Polish criticism, coped with his task.