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The study analyses the reinterpretation of Bürger´s ballad Lenore (1774) in terms of intertextuality, genre and literary movement in the modernist short story by the Polish writer Antoni Lange Lenora (1912). According to Lange, his short story „tries to explain the ´balladic´, spiritist phenomena by rational means“. Lange´s modernist reinterpretation modifies the motif of the return of the dead: in Bürger´s poem it is a physical return of the dead – a spectre having physical features, in Lange´s short story it is Konrad´s revelation interpreted as a metapsychic phenomenon when a telepathic transmission occurs at the moment of Konrad´s death. The syuzhet of the story does not contain a contact with the afterlife and a crossing of the borderline between the opposite semantic territories, being life and death. Therefore Konrad does not act as a diabolical revenant as opposed to all the other balladic variations of the theme.