Seweryn Goszczyński’s The Castle of Kaniów (1828) has remained undeservedly in the shadow of a few other poetic romances of the 1820s and 1830s, the heyday of that genre in Polish literary history. This type of epic poetry has a distinct preference for a non-linear, fragmented plot and a multi-level narrative structure. However, the key note in the design of Goszczyński’s historical romance is sensationalism, which determines the book’s artistic worth and its lasting attractiveness. Goszczyński knows how to employ a whole range of Gothic tricks and is also remarkably adept at using mystery to keep up dramatic tension in his tale of the Cossack uprising of 1768.