POLSKIE GŁOSY O MARYNIE CWIETAJEWEJ
POLISH OPINIONS CONCERNING M. TSVETAIEVA

Summary/Abstract: Tsvetaieva’s works provoke many controversial valuations. It is true that from the very beginning of the creative work of that poetess many distinguished Russian poets took a favourable attitude to her, but reasons extraneous to literature did not facillitate objective research in her poetry. This situation changed radically in the last decade. Therefore there is a need of an analysis of the attitude of Polish literary criticism to Tsvetaieva’s work. The poetess was known in Poland even before the war, but the most important opinions about her were published after 1966. Those opinions are characterized by a decisive departure from the sociological oversimplifications of the preceding period. The Polish critics attempted above all at a precise presentation of the evolution of her work. Nevertheless, those attempts had a systematizing and sorting out character. More important publications dealt with the author’s aesthetic attitude and in particular with her ties with tradition and with her attitude to reality. Conclusions arrived at by Polish critics aimed at the establishment of the universal values of Tsvetaieva’s poetry, which was nourished by the impulses of the national neo-classical tradition and which utilized the experiences of acmeism and futurism in poetics, but which, at the same time, was characterized by an intuitionist and neoromantic attitude to reality. It was just the concept of prophetism of the poet which emphasized her nonconformity. That factexplains in deeper and in broader term her tragedy. The problem of Tsvetaieva’s poetics was a subject of interest to the Polish literary opinion between the wars. In the assessment of that aspect the conclusions arrived at by Polish criticism do not differ from the opinions of Soviet criticism. However the opinion of S. Poliak deserves some special attention. That critic finds a direct connection between the manner of Tsvetaieva’s poetry and her psychological predispositions and her conception of the poet’s role as a discoverer of new regions of verbal expression. This opinion is confirmed by such elements as her creative utilization of the materials of folklore in her poetic vision of the world. In recent years Polish literary criticism also paid a lot of attention to Tsvetaieva’s prose work and to her opinions about the role of literary criticism. Those are, however, only initial results. They confirm, however, particularly in case of literary criticism the continued topicality of those problems in Polish literary life.The present article is closed by formulations of Polish critics confirming the increase of the popularity of Tsvetaieva’s work in the U.S.S.R. and some features of her influence upon the younger generation of Soviet poets. Those opinions are coincident with the latest opinions of Soviet literary criticism. All in all the Polish opinions on Tsvetaieva, related in m any respects to the just tendencies among Soviet critics advocating an objective investigation of her work, introduce a re-interpretation of many traditional opinions, particularly in the case of Tsvetaieva’s aesthetics, poetics and her significance in the history of Soviet literature.

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