Toward the Idea of Polishness: Implications of 1918 for the Former Eastern Galicia, 1918–1939

Author(s): Jagoda Wierzejska / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2018

The paper analyzes the Polish literary discourse on the former Habsburg province ofGalicia, developing after the restoration of Poland’s independence (1918) and the Polishvictory in the Polish-Ukrainian War of Eastern Galicia (1918–1919). Before WWI, especiallybefore the epoch of Galician autonomy (1867–1914), the prevailing discourse on the provincewas imbued by the idea of multi- and transnationalism grounded upon the Habsburg politicalculture. After the war, when Galicia became a part of the reborn Poland, the discoursepertaining to the region underwent a fundamental change. In the interwar Polish literature,the idea of multi- and transnational Galicia was a subject of specific transfers: sometimes ina continuative, usually, however, in a deconstructive version. Namely, it was disassembledand its components, referring to a revised political context, were ideologically used tostrengthen the representation of reality from the exclusive, Polish point of view. The paperfocuses on literary representations of the Polish-Ukrainian War of Eastern Galicia. It discussesthe stages of the aforementioned disassemblement, from the idea of Polish-Ruthenian“brotherhood” to the vision of Polish-Polish brotherhood, i.e. the homogenous Polishnation, from which the Others (Ukrainians, Jews and Austrians), depicted as enemies, wereexcluded with no exception. Such a vision prevailed in the Polish literature up until 1939;it has also had its continuations nowadays.

Spod znaku Kordiana, Anhellego, Lilli Wenedy. Człowiek Herberta, antropologie Słowackiego

Author(s): Karol Samsel / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

The aim of the study is to show the program volume of Zbigniew Herbert, Mr Cogito from 1974, as a collection in which the poet transforms into as much a resonator as a revisor of the basic Polish romantic aesthetic and ethical representations – in Mr Cogito he always identified with the writing of Juliusz Słowacki. The anthropology of Kordian, Lilla Weneda and Anhelli not only influences the activities of Herbertian Mr Cogito, but also shapes his post-heroic genealogy and, speaking the language of Karl Dedecius, “orientation in the postmetaphysical world”. Herbert (as has been shown) thinks about Słowacki in a deep and complex way, focusing his interest on the anthropological potential of the romantic poet’s heroes and Herbert’s own construction and deconstruction game with the mythology produced by Słowacki (venenedism, anhellism, heroism and anti-heroism in Kordian).

Julian Przyboś – poeta nie-„prześnionej rewolucji”

Author(s): Krzysztof Obremski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

Andrzej Leder’s monograph Prześniona rewolucja. Ćwiczenia z logiki historycznej [Sleepwalking the Revolution. An Exercise in Historical Logic] allows us to look at Julian Przyboś in a new perspective, which at least in part removes the communist label from the co-author of the anthology of revolutionary poetry Wzięli diabli pana [The devils have taken the lord] (1955) and thus forces us perhaps even to abandon the “white and red” perception of the 20th-century life stories of Poles. Aware of the historical significance, the poet would not say about the post-war social revolution, “It just happened”.

Ale na razie tu cisza” – fotografie sprzed katastrofy w wybranych zapisach literackich (Stefan Chwin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Wisława Szymborska)

Author(s): Magdalena Strąk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.

Słowacki poza systemem

Author(s): Anna Rzepniewska-Kosińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

Przewodnik po awangardzie „Europy Środkowej”

Author(s): Przemysław Batorski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2020

O kulturze polemik religijnych i powstaniu świadomości wyznaniowej. Uwagi na marginesie pracy Magdaleny Luszczynskiej, Politics of polemics. Marcin Czechowic on the Jews

Author(s): Maciej Ptaszyński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2020

The article deals with a monograph by Magdalena Luszczynska devoted to Marcin Czechowic, one of the most important anti-Trinitarian theologians of the late sixteenth century. The article sets the book against the backdrop of literature on the anti-Trinitarians in Poland and studies of Czechowic. While criticizing the monograph for its narrow source and methodological basis, it offers a new look at the key aspects of the theologian’s life. The central thesis of the article is that the category of religious awareness allows for a different approach to this Protestant’s conversion.

Tomasz Żukowski: Wielki Retusz.

Author(s): Marta Ansilewska-Lehnstaedt / Language(s): German Issue: 3/2021

Book-Review: Tomasz Żukowski, Wielki Retusz. Jak zapomnieliśmy, że Polacy zabijali Żydów. [Die große Retusche. Wie wir vergaßen, dass die Polen Juden töteten.] Wielka Litera. Warszawa 2018. 430 S., Ill. ISBN 978-83-8032-296-7. (PLN 49,90.) ‒ Marta Ansilewska-Lehnstaedt

Homoerotyka i autocenzura. Nowe spojrzenie na wczesną twórczość poetycką Szmuela Jankewa Imbera

Author(s): Adam Stepnowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 45/2020

This article explores queer traits in the early poetry of Shmuel Yankev Imber. The paper identifies those spaces, where the sexual identity of the lyrical “I”was fluid and defied the sexual, social and literary norms of the poet’s time. The article emphasizes acts of self-censorship that occurred within Imber’s oeuvre in the short period between 1909 and 1914 when the poet published his second book. The article also discusses the social and literary context in which Imber lived and worked.

„Językami mówić będę”. Détournement i sequelizacja albo język(i) poetycki(e) Tomasza Bąka

Author(s): Oskar Meller / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2 (18)/2021

In critical overviews of recent Polish poetry, Tomasz Bąk, the author of Bailout, is mentioned among the last decade’s most important debutants. Scholars include Bąk’s project in their ongoing debate over the forms of poetic involvement, but they often ignore an important aspect of his poetry, one that relates to languages. This aspect can be regarded as consisting of at least two levels. Oskar Meller examines the mechanisms of “speaking in tongues” in Bąk’s books of poetry following his debut. The first level of this poet’s work in languages stems from his use of the Debordian détournement, thanks to which the poet “captures” foreign registers, the languages of the media, of social discourses, and of neoliberał economics. The second level concerns sequelization, manifested in a number of ways: the mining of tradition, the spoofing of formulas, repeating other poets’ phrases, and finally inventing his own idioms. This echolalia of diction is present in the construction of the subject called the “schizophrenic collective”, which testifies to the extremely consistent synchronicity of Bąk’s entire project.

Materiality of Poetry: Words and Bodies/ Words and Pictures (Ewa Partum, Andrzej Tobis, Adam Kaczanowski)

Author(s): Anna Kałuża / Language(s): English Issue: 34/2019

The article discusses the possibilities of the emergence of a neo-materialistic aesthetics of the poem. Each of the analyzed examples—Ewa Partum’s active poetry, Adam Kaczanowski’s toy-art and Andrzej Tobis’s photographic archive—reveals different aspects of this aesthetics. The case of Partum shows that the material concreteness of poetry—today also associated with virtuality— requires other ways of perceiving / commenting / documenting the “poems” happening between the media. Active poetry consists in drawing the text (which eventually turns out to be a jigsaw made of letters) out of the formula of the finished object and making the medium of writing/language the material from which the object of artistic attention is “made”. I call Tobis’s project neo-materialistic, since it shows how we move from the human hybrid level we move to normalization and stabilization (and vice versa). Tobis seems to reach the moment when this normalization is actually happening and, at the same time, he shows levels of transformations, mutations and deviations. Kaczanowski “invents” for his poetry a medium different from the traditional record and the traditional form of the book. This principle of “invention” turns out to be very important, because it decides whether some materializations are poetic objects or not, without specifying any initial aesthetic, political and ideological criteria. In the most general terms this new-materialist aesthetics has been linked here with the transmedia horizon of art and the transformations of materialistic thinking made under the influence of the non-anthropocentric imagination.

„Oj skończy się nam, skończy nasze mordowanie”. Ludowe pieśni antyfeudalne, Ściegienny, Szela i możliwy wpływ chłopskiej teologii emancypacyjnej na rabację galicyjską

Author(s): Kasper Pfeifer / Language(s): Polish Issue: 33/2019

Using methodologies that accentuate the narrative and discursive contexts of history, the author analyzes oral literature accompanying the Galician Slaughter led by Jakub Szela (1846) and the revolutionary movement organized in the Congress of Poland by Piotr Ściegienny (1842-1844). The main thesis of this article asserts that both of these anti-feudal movements were interrelated in their theories and practices, and that Piotr Sciegienny’s theology of liberation was their common source. Support for my hypothesis can be found in rebellious folk songs lyrics which have survived to this day. Reconstructing the links between the starting points of peasant engagement in both revolutionary movements, the author compares the textual content of rebel songs from the time of the Galician Slaughter to Piotr Sciegienny’s political works. The parallels that can be found between his writings and both the Galician songs and those of Sciegienny’s own peasant movement lead me to conclude that the practice of the peasant revolutionary movement of the Galician Slaughter was deeply rooted in the theory of Piotr Sciegienny and to perceive in Jakub Szela’s actions his overarching aim – the overthrowing of the Galicia’s feudal system.

Stylistyka listów Bolesława Prusa do żony

Author(s): Magdalena Czachorowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2021

The linguistic shape of the letters depends on the role that the writer plays when writing them to his wife. When he writes from distant Germany, Switzerland, and France, he is a traveler who wants to bring his beloved closer to his views and impressions, hoping to visit wonderful, unknown places together. When he rests in Nałęczów, he verifies or supplements known facts, events, landscapes, talks about new acquaintances, describes the lazily passing days recording even the smallest details. The letters written from the room next door are a language joke, an exercise for a hand hitting the keys of a typewriter. The epistolographic works described above are the best illustration of Stefania Skwarczyńska’s claim that the letter “is a phenomenon in its genesis most strongly associated not only with the person of the author, but also with the person of the addressee who, through his silent participation, grows to the dignity of a co-author”.

Od Bogurodzicy do Kobiety Świętej – o recepcji najstarszej polskiej pieśni przez współczesną młodzież

Author(s): Izabela Kępka ,Lucyna Warda-Radys / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2021

The aim of the article is to analyze elements common to the paraphrases of Bogurodzica – written by the students of one of the secondary comprehensive schools in Łódź and published in “Duży Format” (a supplement to “Gazeta Wyborcza”) in January 2003 – and the medieval original. The analysis involves the elements of the text’s genology: structure of the prayer, sender – receiver relationship, and the universe of the sender’s values expressed in the form of their petitions or desires. The analysis demonstrated the reference of the students’ poems to Bogurodzica. It follows from the shape of the prayerful poem, clearly exposed addressee (predominantly Mother of God or Mother of God and Son of God/God), and – most frequently collective – sender, who brings their petitions to the addressee. In the paraphrases of Bogurodzica the sender is –similarly as the addressee – clearly named (unlike in the medieval hymn), their petitions are more concrete (than these contained in Bogurodzica) and result from their membership in a particular community. The language of these poems is simple, precise, colloquial at times, lacking hieraticism typical of religious language. This results in the desacralization of the texts, but at the same time emphasizes closeness of the sender and the addressee, so important for the young, injured by life, humans.

Cóż po doświadczeniu wojny w czasie zarazy? Kilka uwag o definiowaniu kultury

Author(s): Magdalena Popiel / Language(s): Polish Issue: 34/2020

The paper reflects on the concept of culture from the perspective of those who’ve experienced the cataclysms of the 20th and 21st centuries. The author poses questions about the current experience of the pandemic to verify the “usefulness” of the dominant cultural patterns. The author analyses the particular war experiences of Czesław Miłosz in Warsaw (Legends of Modernity) and Józef Czapski in a prisoner-of-war camp (Proust in Griazowiec). At the center of their traumatic experience is the process of seeking salvation through cultural gestures. The experience of war reveals both the strength and weakness of the fundamental version of culture. The article ends with a question about the topicality of this experience and the upholding power of modern culture.

Iдэйна-мастацкiя пошукi паэтаў беларуска-польскага памежжа: творчасць Адама Плуга

Author(s): Anatol Brusewicz / Language(s): Belarusian Issue: 13/2021

This article is devoted to the study of the ideological and aesthetic foundations of Adam Ploug’s poetry in organic correlation with the artistic experience of other representatives of the Belarusian-Polish literary borderland (A. Mitskevich, J.I. Krashevsky, etc.). It is worth noting that the formation of A. Ploug’s creative consciousness took place under the direct influence of a number of ideas of Western European Romanticism, including the sacralization of the homeland and its past (historical memory), the idealization of freedom, Christian humanism and non-conformism, the idea of the timelessness of art. At the same time, both the concept of the lyrical hero and the artistic space in A. Ploug’s works are all built on the basis of the traditions of the Belarusian folk culture, which makes it possible to assert that the poet belongs primarily to Belarusian Romanticism.

„Zupełnie inne miasto”. Obrazy warszawskiego getta w polskiej literaturze dziecięcej XXI wieku

Author(s): Krzysztof Rybak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

The paper analyses representations of the Warsaw Ghetto in contemporary Polish children’s literature. The aim of the first part of the article is to interpret literary aspects of selected works, mainly Kotka Brygidy [Brygida’s Kitten] by Joanna Rudniańska (2007), Po drugiej stronie okna. Opowieść o Januszu Korczaku [The Other Side of the Window: A Tale about Janusz Korczak]by Anna Czerwińska-Rydel (2012), and Arka czasu, czyli wielka ucieczka Rafała od kiedyś do wtedy przez teraz i wstecz [The Ark of Time, or Rafał’s Great Escape from Once Through Then Until Now and Back] by Marcin Szczygielski (2013). The second part covers an analysis of the illustrations, maps in particular, as they are part of Pamiętnik Blumki [Blumka’s Diary] by Iwona Chmielewska, two editions of Arka czasu (with illustrations by Daniel de Latour, 2013, and the novel’s author, 2015, respectfully), and Ostatnie przedstawienie panny Esterki. Opowieść z getta warszawskiego [Miss Esterka’s Last Show: A Tale from the Warsaw Ghetto] by Adam Jaromir and Gabriela Cichowska (2014), among others.

Bolek i Lolek na „Dzikim Zachodzie”. Była warszawska dzielnica zachodnia w tekstach kultury dla dzieci i młodzieży okresu małej stabilizacji

Author(s): Igor Piotrowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

The so-called ‘Wild West’ in Warsaw, the vast area between Śródmieście, Muranów, and Wola districts, had long remained ruined, neglected, unstructured. Relatively close to the City Centre, visually dominated by the Palace of Culture and Science (which created tensions between old and new urbanities and between prewar and postwar realities), an unusual sanctuary for ruins, prewar buildings, workshops, and tenement houses persisted. This has been problematic for the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic, making this area of the city the place of taboo and shame, but at the same time – a perfect scenography for juvenile adventure fiction. In this article, the author analyses the images of the ‘Wild West’ in the works of famous Polish authors: Edmund Niziurski (Lalu Koncewicz, broda i miłość [Lalu Koncewicz, the Beard, and Love], 1958), Wiktor Woroszylski (I ty zostaniesz Indianinem[You Can be an Indian Too], 1960), and Irena Jurgielewiczowa (Niespokojne godziny [Restless Hours], 1964), as well as in Do przerwy 0:1 [0:1 Until the Break], a TV series by Stanisław Jędryka (1969). As a context to this topographical study, he uses, inter alia, writings of Miron Białoszewski, an admirer and sensitive observer of this part of the city, and the documentary of Danuta Halladin, Moja ulica [My Street] (1965), about children living on one of the streets of the district.

Codzienność wsi po transformacji (Opowieści galicyjskie Andrzeja Stasiuka i Rodzinа Jołtyszewów Romana Senczina)

Author(s): Artur Nowaczewski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 170/2020

The rural areas, remaining on the periphery of the power centres’ interests, especially strongly felt the effect of the systemic transformation. This crisis had a significant impact not only on the economic issues, but also on the family and neighbour relationships, since communism had damaged the harmony of human coexistence with nature and relations inside the local communities. The author presents a look at the rural daily life of the late twentieth century in Poland and Russia using examples of Tales of Galicia by Andrzej Stasiuk and The Yeltyshevs by Roman Senchin — books describing the reality of the countryside in each of the countries. A comparison of these two works reveals significant differences in the ways of capturing reality of the countryside in Poland and Russia.

Medicine in the Service of Nazism and other Silesian Stories – Reconstructing “Memory Shot Through with Holes” in Anna Dziewit-Meller’s Góra Tajget

Author(s): Agnieszka Gawron / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The article discusses the literary reconstruction of the “memory shot through with holes” (H. Raczymow) in Anna Dziewit-Meller’s Góra Tajget (Mount Taygetus). The author analyses how this moral treatise set against the backdrop of the tale about three generations of a Silesian family as well as German eugenic operations fills the empty spaces in history and memory. In this process, the category of the body plays a unique role – one that is supervised by Nazi medicine, as well that which serves as a medium of what has been repressed from consciousness. Another key element of the text is the multiplied figure of the child, which binds together all the stories and accentuates the role of autobiographical factors in postmemorial discourse. Finally, the author examines how the anomalies of the discourse present in the book destroy the comfort of reading, and the literature, presented in an ethical perspective, becomes one of the most important discourses on responsibility, ethics (also medical) and human condition.