“Diary” as Gombrowicz’s Menippeah Cover Image

„Dziennik” jako Gombrowiczowska menippea
“Diary” as Gombrowicz’s Menippeah

Author(s): Magdalena Kowalska
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: Witold Gombrowicz; Gombrowicz’s “Diary;” Mikhail Bakhtin; Bakhtin's “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; Lucian of Samosata; menippeah

Summary/Abstract: The article contains an analysis of menippean aspects of Witold Gombrowicz’s “Diary,” as based mainly on the presentation of menippean satire characteristics carried out by Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo).” Other important point of reference is the writing by one of the most emminent founder of the menippeah, Lucian of Samosata’s. The article points at a number of analogies not only between Lucian and Gombrowicz’s way of thinking and seeing the reality but also between their styles and specyfic formations in fiction. The menippeah proves to be a form of literature which best responds to the Diary’s writer temperament: it allows to a serious pit against the absurd of human existence and against the paradoxes of a writer’s condition but at the same time to relieve those absurds and paradoxes with laughter.

  • Issue Year: 2012
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 35-51
  • Page Count: 17
  • Language: Polish