Wspomnienie Brunona Schulza
An unpublished reminiscence of Bruno Schulz, written on May 7, 1946 by the poet Marian Jachimowicz, who before World War II lived in Borysław and in 1938–1942 was Schulz’s friend.
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An unpublished reminiscence of Bruno Schulz, written on May 7, 1946 by the poet Marian Jachimowicz, who before World War II lived in Borysław and in 1938–1942 was Schulz’s friend.
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This article is an analysis of the animal motifs in Piotr Skarga's Żywoty świętych [The Lives of the Saints]. It might initially seem that they do not play an important role in this monumental work. However, when we pay more attention to them, it turns out that they convey valuable information related to the way in which views on the place of man and animals in the Christian universe were formed. An analysis of the motifs collected in the article shows that there is no justification for those stereotypes which result mainly from an erroneous interpretation of the biblical phrase: „Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”, according to which, from the very beginning, Christianity as a religion was supposed to be characterised by a lack of respect for the created world and a merely instrumental approach to animals. Similarly, the conviction that only St. Francis of Assisi had a friendly relationship with „friars minor”, while other saints were not interested in relationships with them, is also erroneous. The presented text methodologically refers to the findings of the so-called Silesian „school” of micrology, and therefore it aims to concentrate on those parts of the examined work which are considered to be fragments, scraps or „miniatures” – messages that (at first glance) do not determine its value. The present study supplements the article „Znać iżeście i bestyj podlejszy”: zoomorficzne inkarnacje szatana w „Żywotach świętych” Piotra Skargi published in the journal Terminus (2/2019).
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Życiorysy sławnych Polaków [The Lives of Famous Poles] is a lesser-known work by Adam Naruszewicz which encompasses several biographies of outstanding representatives of the Polish Enlightenment. Its basic, although hitherto unnoticed, problem is the attribution of the text. Doubts have been raised about the authorship of the manuscript recorded in Nowy Korbut, as only a few of the biographies included there were actually written by Naruszewicz. However, some justified reservations concerning both the work and its author emerge only in the light of recently discovered manuscripts, as their analysis proves the existence of an unknown work by Adam Naruszewicz.
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This article discusses how the subjects of carnality, memory and dreams influence the reading of Lem's Solaris. The article starts with a discussion of the novel as an open text allowing for multiple interpretations, then it moves on to the innovation of the Alien model presented by Lem. The problems related to body, memory and sleep are generated in the text by the character of Harey, the double of the protagonist's long dead fiancée recreated on Solaris through Kelvin's memories. The author tries to answer the question of whether the woman can be called a human being and what exactly determines that − biology, or an act that is ethically marked? The article also describes the role of memory in the protagonist's internal metamorphosis, as well as mentioning the intertextual trope of Kochanka Szamoty by Stanisław Grabiński.
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Jan Polkowski's poetry is linked to Herbert's through the programme of ethical poetry, which is common to both poets, as well as their characteristic passion for admitting fundamental values and faith in the salvational power of culture. However, an interesting intertextual game, initiated by the younger writer in his poem Przesłanie pana X [The Envoy of Mr X], brings a more nuanced perspective to this simplified image. From the beginning of Przesłanie pana X, it is clear that hope, which Polkowski does not actually reject, seems to be much more problematic in his text than the vision of living in the myths of culture, which emerges from Herbert's work. The image of Polkowski and Różewicz's clear antagonism must also be verified. As the author of Rozmowy z Różewiczem [Conversations with Różewicz], Polkowski allows his older colleagues to drag him into a conversation about poetry and its tasks, outlining not only certain divergences, but also looking for what is close to his heart in Różewicz’s work.
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This article discusses the issue of identity in Krzysztof Varga's works centred on Hungarian themes. The narrative in the prose of the author of Gulasz z Turula [Turul Goulash] combines far--reaching criticism and irony with a nostalgic picture of everyday life and culture. Detailed analyses of Varga's prose show that the writer is a conscious and simultaneously attentive observer of Hungarian reality, who exposes successive components of national myths and symbols, and at the same time reveals the deep sources of his own identity.
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The author of this article analyses the images of Montenegro in Andrzej Stasiuk’s prose, inspired by the reflections contained in Przemysław Czapliński’s Poruszona mapa [A Moved Map]. Limiting the subject of the analysis to this country allows the author to highlight essential features of Stasiuk’s writing which are not always noticed by its critics. In this prose work, attachment to one’s own memory and the author's vision are more important than the goals of non-fiction literature. It is thus dependent on the stereotypes about the Balkans and the author’s own superficial observations.
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The author of this article enters into polemics with Grzegorz Zając's theses as laid out in the article “`The Enlightened Do Not Need To Be Enlightened…' Reflections on School, the Seriousness of Reading and the Madness of Ideology” (Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 67 (2019), no. 1, p. 25-38). The polemics concerns the alleged ideological bias and reductionism of literary interpretation and the instrumentalisation of literature that is said to be carried out by contemporary postmodern literary criticism due to the vulnerability of this same criticism to ideologisation. While Zając opts for a “prelapsarian” return to reading literature as art for its aesthetic qualities, this paper seeks a remedy in a more realistic and less prejudiced “postlapsarian” perspective instead, one calling for a confrontation with the landscape “after the fall” of literary criticism. In this confrontation, which is meant to invite discussion of the values underlying the current approaches in literary studies, a vital role can be played by the neo-Aristotelian “Tradition”, juxtaposed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry with the modernist “Encyclopaedia” and the postmodern “Genealogy.”
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Adolf Arendt (1862-1932), a teacher of freehand drawing in Galician secondary schools, was long considered to have been Bruno Schulz's first art teacher in Drohobych Secondary School. However, in his article entitled Lekcja profesora Arendta [A Lesson Given by Professor Arendt], Professor Władysław Panas shows that Arendt could not have been Schulz's teacher. Panas also discusses why Bruno Schulz immortalised the figure of this art teacher from Drohobych in his Sklepy cynamonowe [Cinnamon The Street of Crocodiles]. Arendt is the only character from Schulz's prose who actually lived in Drohobych. The author of this article meticulously reconstructs the biography of the actual Adolf Arendt, basing it on detailed bibliographic and archival research. Reconstructing unknown facts from Arendt's life, at the same time he outlines the broader historical background of Schulz's oeuvre, which complements the previous findings concerning both Schulz's literary and visual works.
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The paper focuses on the different meanings that the idea of homeland is expressed in Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna’s poetry, comparing them also with what she writes about it in her prose and in private correspondence, in order to find out if and how her attitude toward identitarian matters changed during her long lifetime. Iłłakowiczówna’s case seems particularly relevant in this respect since she lived in a multicultural environment and happened to approach several languages and cultures, and also because of the tensions she had to endure due to the dramatic events that occurred in Central Europe in the course of the century.
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The article focuses on the Attilio Begey Institute of Polish Culture which was created in Turin in 1930, after the death of Attilio Begey in 1928, due to the initiative of Roman Pollak and with Italian and Polish governmental support, as well as with the voluntary help of Italian Polonists. After a few years, the institution became one of the best-performing pro-Polish organizations in Italy. In the article, I point out the Polish and Italian opinions about the activities of this pro-Polish phenomenon in the capital of Piedmont in the first years of its existence.
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The path leading Gustaw Herling to the Soviet gulag and to his pilgrimage as soldier, exile and witness to totalitarianism has its symbolic prologue in Herling reading of Croce’s Storia d’Europa during the summer of 1939. The publication of this text in Poland after the fall of communism represented instead its symbolic landing. Through fragments of memories, the article retraces this path, focusing on the secular “religion of freedom” as one of the pivotal keys of Herling’s life and work.
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The paper focuses on the relations between two 16th century works: Marcellus Palingenius’ The Zodiac of Life and Mikołaj Rej’s The Image of a Good Man’s Life. The philosophical poem Zodiacus vitae fell into oblivion in Italy, but has gained considerable popularity all over Europe since the 16th century. In Poland all the greatest Renaissance humanists, such as Jan Kochanowski and Mikołaj Rej, knew and read it. The latter, clearly inspired by the work of the Italian master, published The Image of a Good Man’s Life in 1558. Since the 19th century there have been some comparative studies of The Zodiac and The Image in the field of Polish literature. This article presents the current state of the research and points out general similarities and differences between these works, regarding both the story line and philosophy.
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The article discusses the usage of the classical topos Graeca fides to describe the citizens of the Grand Duchy of Moscow in early modern Polish literature (chronicles, diaries, journalistic writings, diplomatic reports etc.). This way of speaking was justified by the identification of the Eastern Orthodox Church with the Greek Byzantine Rite. The formula was used to deprecate Russians and became part of a negative stereotype. The author demonstrates, with diverse examples, how this formula became a constant topos in statements about a country considered hostile in Poland since the 16th century, and in which contexts it was developed.
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The article compares two 19th century historical novels about the Cossack uprisings of the 17th century. Z burzliwej chwili by Teodor Tomasz Jeż describes the eve of Khmel’nytskyj’s Uprising, while Michał Czajkowski’s Hetman Ukrainy depicts the later civil war period called “the Ruin”. The authors were well-known émigré activists and former insurgents, now mostly forgotten in the literary canon. Their narratives influenced later works about the Cossacks. Similarities and differences between these works are discussed, highlighting aspects of Ruthenian society omitted by the authors.
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Palace and hovel, one of the earliest (1875) works of Boleslaw Prus, is preserved as a whole in manuscript and offers interesting material for editorial-philological research. The pages contain many deletions, amendments, additions made in the author’s hand. This enables us to observe how work on the text proceeded and which parts of the text had an entirely different form than the one commonly known from the published version of the novel.
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In 1930 Sibilla Aleramo translated the play Dom kobiet by Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska into Italian. This three-act drama, probably the first play with only female characters in the history of theatre, was set in Warsaw the same year and was suddenly a huge success in Poland. Aleramo’s translation has remained unpublished and has been preserved (as a manuscript and a typescript draft) in the author’s archive belonging to the Fondazione Istituto Gramsci in Rome. The paper focuses on the history of this text, based mainly on the analysis of Nałkowska’s diary and unpublished letters and documents from Aleramo’s archive.
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In my article I compare two versions of Jewish religiosity. The literary works, which feature believers of Judaism from Eastern Europa and Haskala supporters were written in Polish (Melcer), Yiddish (Schneersohn) and German (Döblin).
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Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) and Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) are two intellectuals who in different times and places, each with his own cultural background, decided to push their artistic and intellectual research beyond the borders of pure literary expression in order to understand an increasingly indecipherable and threatening present. Two intellectuals in many ways very different from each other, but with a common passion – Africa. The Black Continent, the privileged object of their reflections, represents an original world, untouched by the capitalist and neo-imperialistic aspirations of poisoned Western society, thus becoming a mixture of romantic fantasies and dreams of unteachable regenerations.
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The author presents the reception of the works of Czesław Miłosz in Italy starting from the first articles mentioning his name in the late 1940s. After his emigration from Poland in the 1950s, thanks to his efforts in favor of freedom of expression and of criticism of socialist realism, he found many Italian intellectuals who shared the same views. In 1980, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Miłosz had his greatest moment of fame, which allowed him to publish his most important works in Italy. The second part of the article consists of the complete bibliography of Miłosz’s texts in Italian, including those published in newspapers and magazines.
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