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Das schlesische Aschenputtel als Romanfigur...: ein Beitrag zu einer deutsch-polnischen „Doppelbiographie“

Author(s): Nina Nowara-Matusik / Language(s): German Issue: 22/2022

The subject of this article is the Polish-German “double biography” of Countess Joanna von Schaffgotsch as portrayed in the novel Zink wird Gold by Georg Zivier and Hans Nowak and in Gustaw Morcinek’s Pokład Joanny. The comparative analysis focuses on the dominant narrative threads and the approaches to represent this historical figure, with the portrayal of the countess as the “Silesian Cinderella” existing as a point of reference in the public consciousness. The analyses conducted in this context lead to the conclusion that Nowak/Zivier’s biography of the countess generally corresponds to historical truth and is realistic in this sense, while the ideological aspect dominates in Morcinek’s narration. The two ‘biographies’ do not take into account the regional specificity of the Countess figure.

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Ojczyzna – obczyzna. Stanisław Przybyszewski o swej niemieckiej przeszłości... w kręgu berlińskiej bohemy

Author(s): Katarzyna Badowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 22/2022

This article explores the Berlin period in the life and work of Stanisław Przybyszewski (1889–1898), one of the most famous writers of Young Poland, particularly focusing on why Przybyszewski – a writer debuting works in German and considered by scholars a Polish-German writer – came to increasingly depreciate his participation in the literature of his Western neighbors. In his memoirs, published before his death, he categorically stated: „I owe German literature – absolutely nothing”. In this essay, the researcher examines the circumstances in which Przybyszewski shone as a writer in the Berlin bohemian circle. Next, she shows how he discredited the entire cultural life of Jung-Deutschland, and renounced his artistic ties established in Germany. Finally, she speculates on why Przybyszewski created an unfavorable image of the German community at the end of the 19th century, and indicates that this process went hand in hand with the self-creation of a Polish writer.

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Karla Dedeciusa portret podwójny... O tłumaczu poezji polskiej i autorze refleksji o literaturze

Author(s): Danuta Łazarska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 22/2022

The aim of this article is to portray Karl Dedecius, a translator of Polish poetry and author of reflections on literature. The picture of the connoisseur and lover of Polish works is accompanied by parallel reflections on Dedecius as a person, his double biography, the role he played in dealing with the works of Polish writers as well as the influence of literature on him. The reflections are based, among other things, on the research into Dedecius’ essays, lectures, his autobiography and his correspondence with Tadeusz Różewicz. The proposed considerations and the types of documents mentioned – which contain a wealth of information about the translator’s private life, e.g. his preferred values, hi views on interpersonal relations, and his professional life, e.g. his passion for translating literature, its influence on building positive relations between nations – are related to selected elements of the theory and methodology of biographical research.

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„Utopkowa” tożsamość w niemieckojęzycznej powieści Leszka Libery

Author(s): Agnieszka Miernik / Language(s): Polish Issue: 22/2022

This article reflects on the universal values of Leszek Libera’s novel Utopek, on what always remains “unspeakable” in Silesian issues, and on the internal life of the personal (author’s) and collective memory of Silesian generations. The author deals, in an original and profound way, with the problems that are still traumatic for many people in Upper Silesia. The complex Polish-German biographies of the inhabitants of the Silesian lands include the fate of the author and his family, contributing to the collective memory of a difficult past. Written in exile, the German-language work was highly praised by native critics, who stressed that the novel could rival the great classics. The emigrants outlook allowed for a distanced and multi-perspective view of history that cannot be discussed in rigid paradigms. The specificity, complexity and indeterminacy of Silesian identity are expressed in the novel through the figure of the Utopling, a fictional being who does not fit into the world in which he lives, who perceives the absurdities of reality and longs to return to his native utopia. The figure of the Utopling embraces the extremes and opposites inherent in the Silesian landscape. The character is at once hypersensitive and cruel, native and universal, local and a stranger, outgoing and claustrophobic, likeable and repulsive.

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Służba kobiety

Author(s): Zofia Ozaist-Zgodzińska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 22/2022

Review of: Służba kobiety Dariusz Kulesza, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka. Służba, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, Łódź 2021, ss. 260

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O wpływie spuścizny Świętej Teresy z Ávili na piśmiennictwo i kulturę polskiego barokuchivalric romances, Poland, Poles, toponyms, 16th century

Author(s): Katarzyna Kaczor-Scheitler / Language(s): Polish Issue: 21/2021

The subject of this article is to discuss the penetration of influences of Spanish mysticism, in particular, the works of Saint Teresa of Ávila, on the literature and culture of the Polish Baroque. The intercultural influence of Spanish mysticism on Polish artists is reflected in the translations of the writings of Saint Teresa of Ávila. The considerations focus on the influence of the mysticism of Saint Teresa on mystical autobiographies and anonymous poetry of Carmelite nuns from Krakow from the 17th and 18th centuries. The reflection also covers the centres of the veneration of the saint in Poland, in services and prayer books, and her popularisation through art. Mystical influences are also visible in the poetry of the 17th and 18th centuries, including poetry by Kasper Twardowski, Sebastian Grabowiecki, Stanisław Grochowski, Mikołaj Mieleszko, Zbigniew Morsztyn, Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, Elżbieta Drużbacka, and Konstancja Benisławska. The Polish-Spanish ties situate the research issues undertaken in a comparative context, without which the studies on post-Tridentine spirituality would not have produced real achievements.

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António Feijó i Leopold Staff – poetyckie wizje Orientu… na tle polsko-portugalskich relacji literackich i kulturalnych (od parnasizmu do palimpsestu)

Author(s): Anna Kalewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 21/2021

The article aims to discuss the Chinese culture inspirations in Polish and Portuguese modernist poetry. In the context of Polish-Portuguese literary relationships, late Romantic, Symbolic, Parnassianism-related and Oriental tendencies are presented in the works of a Portuguese poet Antón Feijó (1859–1917), with references to a selected aspect of Leopold Staff’s works (1878–1957). A historical-literary analysis is accompanied by literary and cultural comparative studies. Within the comparative method of presenting the Parnassian palimpsests, as The Chinese Lyric Book (Cancioneiro Chinês, 1890) by António Feijó and Chinese Flute (Fletnia chińska, 1922) by Leopold Staff are categorised, the thesis about the independent status of the works in question was built. Modernist visions of the Orient, understood to date a paraphrase or an adaptation of Chinese poetry read in translations from French, gain the status of original works. In view of blurring the differences between the European adaptations – Portuguese poem and Polish poetic prose, based on Oriental motifs drawn from two different French sources (translations): Judith Gautier’s and Franz Touissant’s works – and the Chinese original, the methodological approach to the text as to a palimpsest is justified. Feijó’s “Chinese Poetry” and Oriental poetic landscapes in Staff’s prose are therefore independent literary works, analysed in parallel, as mirror reflections of the fascination with the Orient’s culture. The literary works in question fully deserve the title of cultural texts, the recipient of which will be a Polish reader, a lover of poetry inspired by French Parnassianism.

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Córki powietrza. Sen Balladyny: Calderón spotyka Słowackiego w polu literackim…, czyli hiszpańsko-polska comedia colaborada XXI wieku

Author(s): Marta Eloy Cichocka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 21/2021

Literary relations between Poland and Spain are not only the subject of some purely theoretical considerations of this essay, but also a space for creative practice within the literary field, in the sense proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, as a complex network of positions, relations, and rivalries between its participants, individuals, and institutions. The main subject of the article is the process of creating a Polish-Spanish dramatic collage called Daughters of the Air. Balladyna’s Dream (2019) based on Calderon’s and Słowacki’s dramas, grounded in the historical context, from the Polish-Spanish dramaturgical assumptions to the bilingual libretto of the play, which premiered first in Opole and then in Almagro. Such a process of creative rewriting of our classic literature can be compared to the forgotten comedias colaboradas, which were extremely popular in Spain during the Golden Age: those multi-author dramatic adaptations often resulted from a fruitful collaboration between two, three, or even more writers and dramaturges, which nowadays seems somehow more challenging.

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Reportaż magiczny? Uwagi o Wszystkich zajęciach Yoirysa Manuela Adama Kwaśnego

Author(s): Tomasz Pindel / Language(s): Polish Issue: 21/2021

Wszystkie zajęcia Yoirysa Manuela [All occupations of Yoirys Manuel] by Adam Kwaśny (2017) is a collection of stories about the inhabitants of the city of Trinidad in Cuba, which can be read as an attempt to look for a new approach in the travel literature and reportage writing. By the use of the techniques typical for magical realism and non-fiction literature at the same time, the work shows the reality of the city from the perspective of its inhabitants, or more precisely: from the perspective of a narrator coming from the outside world, but sharing the beliefs and worldview of the described people.

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Nobile e ignobile simbolismo islamico nella Divina Commedia

Author(s): Marino Alberto Balducci / Language(s): Italian Issue: 20/2020

Within the mysteries of The Divine Comedy, it seems that the culture of Muslims is well known to Dante, above all thanks to the mediation of works such as the Book of Muhammad’s Ladder (Kitāb al miʿrāj), the Travels of Marco Polo and various writings of friar Riccoldo of Montecroce. Islam is considered a danger, yet it is also admired in Dante’s vision, for its sci entific height reached in the Middle Ages. Love is the essential concept of the whole message of Christianity: it is caritas, a universal embrace that includes every aspect of man and har monizes it. Muhammad, despite his original Christian spiritual formation, according to Dante, did not understand the concept of caritas. Therefore, he deceived others and himself, found ing a new creed and a different faith, which is by no means superfluous from a Dantean point of view. Indeed, it is useless and dangerous as a heresy, due to its same nature that generates schism and, precisely, war. It is natural, in this sense, that Muhammad finds himself in hell in the vision of The Divine Comedy, grotesquely oppressed by his guilt of fraud, because he has shared the circle of love (the all ¬encompassing and Trinitarian perfection of Love) with all the hatred of his anger. However, beyond all the Muslim limits of a culture of submission and the doctrine that arises from it, Dante reveals to us in his Paradise a possible salvation also for Islam (apparently damned); and this for a very subtle yet strong way: the mystical way in its perfect sentimental Truth, which is tolerant, fraternal and inclusive.

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Damnosa tarditas. Ślady lektury Biblii w listach Francesca Petrarki

Author(s): Albert Gorzkowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

The following paper is dedicated to the topic of biblical motifs in Francesco Petrarca’s letters, which belong to anubi leones sphere in historical literary research both in Poland and the whole of Europe. If we are to believe the modest and critical confessions made by Petrarca in his writings, the author of Canzoniere was rather slow in realising the importance of an in¬depth study of the Bible, and he regarded the awareness of this ignorance as gross neg-ligence (damnosa tarditas), which made him blind for the inestimable value of the holy books. References to various biblical passus and pericopes in Familiares and Seniles are rarely used by Petrarca as purely elocutive ornaments or testimonies of his erudition, more frequently playing the role in the area of inventionis of an epistolary structure. From among all the bib-lical books, Petrarca most frequently and most willingly reached in his letters for The Book of Psalms, which he used (like Saint Augustine) in a very specific argumentation as an author-itative testimony of sapiential character. Biblical characters and motifs, as well as ‘winged words’, derived from prophetic books, the Gospels and Saint Paul’s letters are often found in Petrarca’s letters, which are deeply imbued with thoughts on ultimate matters, painful struggles with one’s own weaknesses, and a dramatical relationship between man and God.

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Genologia i finezja. Najkrótsze pieśni Jana Kochanowskiego

Author(s): Elwira Buszewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

The purpose of this paper is the analysis of the shortest songs from Jan Kochanowski’s collection Pieśni. These include a petrarchist Pieśń II 21, and above all, four horatian ¬origin works Pieśń: I 11 (Stronisz przede mną, Neto nietykana), II 7 (Słońce pali, a ziemia idzie w po¬piół prawie), II 16 (Nic po tych zbytnich potrawach...) and II 23 (Nie zawżdy, piękna Zofija...). Following a short review of previous attempts at classifying Kochanowski’s Pieśni, which were made by Polish scholars, as well as considering other options of categorising lyrical songs, the author indicated the contexts of particular works, described their rhetorics and emphasised the mastery of the poet, which is manifested through the construction of such sophisticated forms. A song, under Kochanowski’s pen, became a brief but comprehensive genre. It comprised solemnity and joy, elegiac mood and frivolous joke.The purpose of this paper is the analysis of the shortest songs from Jan Kochanowski’s collection Pieśni. These include a petrarchist Pieśń II 21, and above all, four horatian ¬origin works Pieśń: I 11 (Stronisz przede mną, Neto nietykana), II 7 (Słońce pali, a ziemia idzie w po¬piół prawie), II 16 (Nic po tych zbytnich potrawach...) and II 23 (Nie zawżdy, piękna Zofija...). Following a short review of previous attempts at classifying Kochanowski’s Pieśni, which were made by Polish scholars, as well as considering other options of categorising lyrical songs, the author indicated the contexts of particular works, described their rhetorics and emphasised the mastery of the poet, which is manifested through the construction of such sophisticated forms. A song, under Kochanowski’s pen, became a brief but comprehensive genre. It comprised solemnity and joy, elegiac mood and frivolous joke.

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Od „śmierdzącego dudka” po banialuki. Obraz ptaków w literaturze renesansu i baroku – rekonesans

Author(s): Dariusz Chemperek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

Birds function in Polish literature of Renaissance and Baroque in three paradigms. Mostly they appear as creatures gifted with a symbolic (allegoric) meaning, seen through the prism of the tradition reaching to Aristotle’s Zoology, Physiologist, and later symbological compendia. The second category is describing birds as food or pests (especially in hunting and agricultural literature). Apart from this ‘practical’ paradigm, there is also a third one: birds as a source of an aesthetic thrill, fascination with them includes both lyricism and a ludic element.The first two categories fit into a more general utilitarian paradigm. Handbooks, trea-ties, sermons, fairy tales, paroemias and animal epigrams showcase birds almost exclu-sively as tools of moral, religious and conventional reflection, or as objects to be obtained and consumed. Interestingly, the symbological activity of the creators does not cease in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, the representatives of avifauna are burdened with new meanings, while the fantastic creatures slowly disappear from the creators’ fields of view. In the third group of works distinguished here, one can notice the phenomenon of the eman-cipation of birds as objects of interest just as they are, although their voice is heard mostly in the digressions scattered throughout the big epic works. The autonomy of birds in the literature of Renaissance and Baroque is not linear, the way of perceiving them is deter-mined by the individual sensitivity of the authors, the most prominent of whom are Hieronim Morsztyn (early 17th century) and an anonymous translator of the Italian Adon (2nd half of the 17th century).

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Polska epika bohaterska przed i po Gofredzie

Author(s): Roman Krzywy / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

The article is a review of the most important trends in the development of the Polish epic in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the absence of significant traditions of knightly works, the creation of Polish heroic poetry should be associated primarily with the humanistic move¬ment, whose representatives set a heroic epic at the top of the hierarchy of genres and rec¬ognized Eneid as its primary model. The postulate proposed first by the Renaissance and later by the Baroque authors did not lead to the creation of a ‘real’ epic in Poland. The trans¬lations of: the Virgil’s epic poem (1590) by Andrzej Kochanowski and Book 3 of The Iliad by Jan Kochanowski can be regarded as the genre substitutes. These translations seem to test whether the young Polish poetic language is able to bear the burden of an epic matter. Then again, the works of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski on the Latin Lechias (the 1st half of the 17th century), which was to present the beginnings of the Polish state, were not completed. Polish Renaissance authors preferred themes from modern or even recent history, choosing Bellum civile by Lucan as their general model but they did not refrain from typically heroic means in the presentation of the subject. This is evidenced by such poems as The Prussian War (1516) by Joannis Vislicensis or Radivilias (1592) by Jan Radwan. The Latin epic works were followed by the vernacular epic in the 17th century, when the historical epic poems by Samuel Twardowski and Wacław Potocki were created, as well as in the 18th century (the example of The Khotyn War by Ignacy Krasicki). The publication of Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem delivered translation by Piotr Kochanowski in 1618 introduced to the Polish liter¬ature a third variant of an epic poem, which is a combination of a heroic poem and romance motives. The translation gained enormous recognition among literary audiences and was quickly included in the canon of imitated works, but not as a model of an epic, but mainly as a source of ideas and poetic phrases (it was used not only by epic poets). The exception here is the anonymous epos entitled The siege of Jasna Góra of Częstochowa, whose author spiced the historical action of the recent event with romance themes, an evident reference to the Tasso’s poem. The Polish translation of Tasso’s masterpiece also contributed to the popularity of the ottava rima, as an epic verse from the second half of the 17th century (previously the Polish alexandrine dominated as the equivalent of the ancient hexameter). This verse was used both in the historical and biblical epic poems, striving to face the rhythmic challenge.

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Jan Kochanowski w 1888 roku. Raport o stanie badań

Author(s): Urszula Kowalczuk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

In this paper, the author reconstructs a critical-literary discussion, which took place in 1888 after the release of the monograph devoted to Jan Kochanowski by Stanisław Tarnowski. It was an attempt at combining previous findings on the biography and work of the Renaissance poet. Reading the most important critical statements evoked by Tarnowski’s book made it possible to characterise an important state of research into Kochanowski’s work and indicate essential problematic issues (religious matters, ‘the Ronsard question’, the case of Kochanowski’s artistic creativity, assessing the advancement of knowledge about his works), which in the 19th century were regarded as arguable, unresolved or demanding a particular cognitive effort. The authors in those days, thanks to their joint effort, managed to determine the scope of issues which would be investigated by researchers in the following years.

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Potencjał błędu. Bat Country on LCD Leszka Onaka w mash -upowym dialogu z Trenem I Jana Kochanowskiego

Author(s): Bogusława Bodzioch-Bryła,Dariusz Rott / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

The text focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the poem 'Bat Country on LCD' by Leszek Onak, which is a new media, subversive processing of 'Lament 1' - one of the threnodies by Jan Kochanowski, the work which is well-established in the literary tradition. Due to the processes mentioned above, Kochanowski’s poem has been subject to a rapid and radical generative transformation. The authors emphasise that the work of Onak differs significantly from the previous artistic acts of Kochanowski’s followers because Onak grounds his creative strategy in the references to the sphere of new technologies, hybridisation processes, the programming language and, first of all, he uses the subversive remix and mash-up strategies, which results in a radical change of both, the situation of artistic communication and the reception behaviours.

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Miejsce tradycji. Refleksja autobiograficzna Wilhelminy Zyndram -Kościałkowskiej

Author(s): Dawid Maria Osiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

The paper is an attempt at showing - through the prism of autobiographical reflection - the location of tradition, as understood by Wilhelmina Zyndram-Kościałkowska (1844-1926), a translator, writer and literary critic. The notion of location is understood by the author as a particular, restricted, time-spatial reservoir of meanings, perceived in a broader perspective, that is as a component of a larger whole. The location of tradition is a segment and stage concerning a problem residuum of meanings in culture and history, as well as in the history of thought, which has been located in the space of individual biography of Kościałkowska, constructed with an old hand of the writer and placed as a component of diagnoses in her contemporaneity. The research material includes manuscripts (notebooks with memories and other types of autobiographical archives), deposited in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius (Lietuvos Valstybės Istorijos Archyvas). The author shows various ways of conducting dialogue by the critic with the old tradition (history, politics, culture, portraits of people, literature, art, family history) and the meaning of the location of tradition in the process of recording oneself and one’s contemporaneity by Kościałkowska.

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Jedna, żadna i sto tysięcy. Włoszka jako medium

Author(s): Katarzyna Woźniak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 19/2019

The stake in a heated discussion on reviving tarantism in the Salentian culture by initiators and partcicipants of the project ‘The spider of a dancing god’ was the reinterpretation of the phenomenon itself: tarantism, which was perceived as a thing of the past and an embarrassing social problem, was to become artistically modified, namely isolated from life and displayed on stage. Rejecting tarantism as a folk practice and an attempt at representing it could also be interpreted as turning a blind eye to the problem of a woman’s position in society, without proposing anything in turn. Technological and social progress did not go hand in hand with the emancipation of an Italian woman. Luigi Piradnello in his drama, and Franka Rame in her monodrama captured this phenomenon brilliantly

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The paradox of death and the Theatre of the Absurd

Author(s): Dariusz Piotr Klimczak / Language(s): English Issue: 19/2019

The aim of the article is the presentation of some interesting and stimulating questions connected with the problem of eschatological codes in the Theatre of the Absurd. The main objective of this paper is to discuss the topos of Death in the Theatre of the Absurd. Because the subject has been underexplored so far, the author tries to triangulate the Theatre of the Absurd within the genre of drama first, and then moves on to the short reflection on chosen plays of Beckett and Ionesco, concentrating on the role that eschatological elements, funereal objects and eschatons play in them. The starting point of this paper could be called “eschatology of the Absurd” or “immortality deconstructed”. Meaninglessness, as the value of absolute meaning, the meaning (Sinn) and significance (Bedeutung) of Death in the Theatre of the Absurd, is also discussed. As a method of research, he proposes a short “collective phenomenological analysis”. To analyse the issue from a broad perspective, the author takes into account the relationships between the writers and their times, and refers to cultural sources, specifically the Paradox of Death in the Theatre -particularly in the Theatre of the Absurd.

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Wokół lwowskiej edycji Pokoju na poddaszu… Wandy Wasilewskiej (1940)

Author(s): Krzysztof Woźniakowski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 16/2018

The article revolves around the reedition of a youth novel A Room in the Attic (Pokój na poddaszu, 1939) by Wanda Wasilewska, published under the Soviet occupation of Lviv by the Kiev-Lviv National Minorities State Publishing USSR in 1940. It attempts to place it on the background of the entirety of the modest release production of this publishing house in the area of belles-lettres in the years 1940–1941 (among 181 published books only 26 literary positions, including only 7 from Polish literature), pointing most of all to the changes made by the Soviet censorship in regards to the pre-war original (especially the elimination of all mentions of Poland and liberation fights, pejorative descriptions of Russian people in the context of the remembering of 1905 revolution, mentions of religion, the words “pan” and “pani” (lord and lady), and – by adding a few sentences not present in the original – bolstering the “class” context of the text and changing the expression of the ending from moderately optimistic to pessimistic). The post-war reeditions of the novel by Wasilewska in PPR (from 1946–1988) restored the pre-war integral version of the text, rendering the cut-down and changed Lviv version invalid, and making it a documentation of its times.

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