Etyka i polityka. O twórczości Pawła Smoleńskiego
Ethics and Politics. On the Work of Paweł Smoleński

Summary/Abstract: In her article, Monika Wiszniowska looks into Paweł Smoleński’s creativeness. Smoleński is a reporter and publicist, since 1989 a journalist affiliated with „Gazeta Wyborcza”, and an author of many books in which he has written on Polish and international issues, regarded as the most important observer of Israeli and Middle East affairs. Wiszniowska focuses on Smoleński’s two roles, adequately concretized in two textual layers. The first role is that of a social and political writer, realized in this part of a text which tells the reader about the world, using the available knowledge and acting as a guide to unknown parts of the world. He tries to understand this world, and to explain the phenomena that occurr in it. In his books, Smoleński is not trying to convey or make visible his ideology but rather to present the ideas that influence the text’s structure. One can find those ideas not only in the few passages which present the author’s way of thinking, but above all in deeper layers of narration, where one can discover Smolenski’s perception of the world. The other role is that of a writer-humanist who cannot narrate any complicated events in our present day reality without concentrating on the fate on an individual human being. He listens to his protagonists’ stories as they tell about their experiences but also as they expose their individual ways of thinking. In Smolenski’s tales, not only those concerning the Middle East, we find incorporated an ethical project which is based on such European values as rationalism and the anthropocentric perspective. Both roles complement each other creating the original idiom of Smolenski’s work.

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