„Fraucymer”. Na tropach intymnej historii polskiej wersologii
„Fraucymer”. Tracing the Intimate History of Polish Versology

Summary/Abstract: The subject of the article is an attempt to outline the cultural history of Polish versology, specifically the history of the Department of Artistic Language headed by Maria Renata Mayenowa since the late 1940s at the Institute of Literary Research in Warsaw. Posing questions suggested by the intimate and the emotional history of knowledge, the author tries to situate the history of versology by presenting the personal perspective of Mayenowa and her collaborators, using as material for analysis primarily archival correspondence and memoirs. Two main theses emerge from the article. The first states that practicing versology in the People’s Republic of Poland was not ideologically neutral, moreover, by its very nature, it enabled dropping political hints. The second thesis is that both the specificity of the conducted research and the style of argumentation were in the case of Mayenowa and her colleagues coherent with their model of socio-cultural upbringing, their work ethic, values and worldviews. In other words, the fact that Warsaw’s versology was exactly what it was, resulted from a specific combination of biographical, historical-political and socio-cultural reasons.

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