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Zbigniew Herbert (1924, Lviv - 1998, Warsaw) was a Polish poet, essayist and playwright. He was one of the most influential Polish poets of the second half of the twentieth century, whose work was translated into major languages. The collection Pan Cogito was published in 1974, influencing the development of Polish poetry, and its protagonist became a constant attribute of Herbert's texts, appearing in all subsequent poetry collections: "Report from a City Under Siege" (1983), "Elegy for Farewell" (1990), "Rovigo" (1992), and "Epilogue of the Storm" (1998).

The figure of Mr Cogito is at the same time the poet's alter ego, a literary mask through which the author speaks on arbitrary topics while maintaining a distance from his character, as well as a collective portrait of an intellectual in Central and Eastern Europe. From the very beginning of his creative activity, Herbert's poetry gravitated towards philosophical issues, and in the figure of Mr Cogito it found its ideal embodiment, combining the universality of abstract philosophical problems with the fate of a particular person against the backdrop of the dramatic history of the 20th century.