Polityka i erotyka w Martwym morzu Emila Zegadłowicza
Politics and Eroticism in Emil Zegadłowicz’s Martwe morze [Dead Sea]

Summary/Abstract: Emil Zegadłowicz’s last novel Martwe morze (Dead Sea, 1939) was seen as something of a failure. The first-person narrator, Jan w Oleju Zydla, appears unformed in both social and psychological terms. Sexual desire in the novel has less to do with the partner’s sex than with his or her revolutionary stance. Zydla first directs his revolutionary desire towards his childhood friend Rudolf Istinks, and when this is revealed as a mere projection he turns to the young teacher Stefania, a subletter. She allows him to give a concrete shape to his political revolutionary zeal and to normalise his erotic desire. Śmieja draws on Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick’s notion of homosocial desire and on Susan Sontag’s conceptof fascinating fascism to shed light on what motivated Zegadłowicz to form a fictional universe in which the revolutionary erotisation of the political sphere is inextricably linked to the politisation of the erotic sphere.

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