This article argues that Witold Gombrowicz’s “0 Dantem” (1966) and Osip Mandel’shtam’s “Razgovor o Dante” (1933), two essays on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, differ fundamentally in both content and style, while at the same time similarly addressing the complex relationship between writer, reader, and text. This study has therefore chosen an approach based on reception theory. The article’s main objective is to highlight the infl uence of Mandel’shtam’s and Gombrowicz’s personal, national, and genrespecifi c backgrounds on their readings of Dante. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Mandel’shtam’s perspective as a Russian poet strongly affects his essay, whereas Gombrowicz adopts an explicitly non-Polish attitude, entering into a dialog with Dante as a provocative prose writer.