The article is written in honour of the 30th anni­versary of Witold Lutosławski’s death. The main topic of the text is his artistic and aesthetic views during the time when the decline of socialist realism aesthetics began in Poland. These changes also affected musical art: the years of interest in Western avant-garde music came and the “Warsaw Autumn” festival of contemporary music was founded. Lutosławski enthusiastically followed these events and had an irresistible desire for his compositional techniques and style to change. His searches led him to the so-called controlled aleatoric music, which influenced a generation of com­posers in Poland and the entire world. Lutosłavski, with deep conviction, spoke about the avant-garde and tried to keep up with it. Despite being nurtured in the European tradition from Bach to Debussy and Prokofiev, he tended to logically continue it and enrich musical means of expression, rather than destroying and building the musical world from the ground up. At the same time, he emphasized the inevitability of contemporary compositional techniques and devices, while gradually moving away from the avant-garde. The article highlights this contradiction.