The starting point of the literary-historical studies in his paper is the discussion of realism raised among the leading Polish literary critics during the nineties, the dominant objection of the elder critics being that the contemporary Polish literature (literature of young generation after 1987 or 1989) did simply not described the fundamental social changes in the new reality. The paper attempts to prove that the basic controversy arose from different historical experiences of the participants involved in the discussion. It is for this very reason that the short history of understanding the concept of realism in the Polish literature after 1945 has been outlined: from realism as a therapy, "great realism", socialist realism, symbolical realism and ethical realism up to its negation in the model of nostalgic prose - the model which marked not only the prose of the nineties. In this connection the basic social presumptions of these changes have been indicated as well as the transformation of the literary model and the market influencing this model considerably: the "market" under the ideological fight as well as under the so called social normalization.