Komunistyczna agitka czy jednak coś więcej?
A Communist Propaganda Leaflet or Something Else?

On Bruno Jasieński’s “Palę Paryż” (“I Burn Paris”)

Summary/Abstract: “Palę Paryż (I Burn Paris)”, a novel by Bruno Jasieński, published for the first time in the year 1928, is still vivid in literary discourse, and continuously enjoys reader interest, the evidence of which is the novel’s new editions (the latest from the year 2005) as well as new translations into foreign languages (in 2012 into English). The novel’s interpretations formulated so far are somewhat superficial and do not further validate their plausibility. The author of the article considers some of the theses most often unarguably adopted, especially the issue of the novel’s utopianism and its allusiveness to Paul Morand’s novel “Je brûle Moscou (I Burn Moscov)”. The plot of Jasieński’s piece is researched within the categories of an intellectual experiment; the paper also includes the novel’s updating interpretation as a text about violence mechanisms in a society. The ideological matter of “I Burn Paris” is viewed from the perspective of a few versions of the text modified by the author himself. The article indicates that the vision of communist paradise presented in the final part of the novel does not diminish its semantic potential, as well as highlights the stylistic richness and compositional content of “I Burn Paris”.

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