Sensing the meaning, working towards the facts: drugie pokolenie a pamięć o Zagładzie w tekstach Bożeny Keff, Magdaleny Tulli i Agaty Tuszyńskiej

Author(s): Anja Tippner / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2016

The article explores the concept of generation within the frame of autobiographical and autofictional writing on th Shoah by children of Shoah survivors. The study traces the history of the term „second generation” that has been coined in the 1980s and the implications of this concept for the autobiographical texts. The article states that the term is not only a way to configure (literary) history but also linked to a certain poetics of writing. The author then provides an analysis of the distinctive features of „second generation” texts by Eva Hoffman, Bożena Keff, Magdalena Tulli, and Agata Tuszyńska, highlighting typifications and domains of relevance.

Wstręt jako miejsce prawdy. Transgresywne doświadczenie abiektu w reportażu Bomżycha Jacka Hugo-Badera

Author(s): Mateusz Zimnoch / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2016

This article deals with the problem of truth in Jacek Hugo-Bader’s Reportage ‘Bomżycha’ [Bomzhykha is the female form of bomzh, a homeless person; bomzh is an acronym for bez opredelyonnogo mesta zhitelstva – ‘with no fixed place of abode’] in relation to the category of disgust. The notion of truth is key to the study of factographical texts (creative non-fiction), but it is rarely examined through categories outside the definition of correspondence. Meanwhile, the notion of disgust, understood as an anthropological category, easily inscribes itself into the character of factographical texts on themes that are placed under a social taboo. Hugo-Bader’s work belongs to this model, as it engages in the inner struggle between the drive to reject something disgusting and the drive to get to know and affirm it – a struggle that allows to touch the essence of the phenomenon described. This procedure aims to minimize the distance between the perceiving subject and the foreign surrounding, and to reduce the level of mediation in the reportage text.

Gombrowicz we współczesnej Argentynie. Lektura grupy „Literal”

Author(s): Ewa Kobyłecka-Piwońska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2016

This article presents the way in which Witold Gombrowicz’s works were interpreted by the Argentine writers who edited the periodical Literal in the 1970s. Drawing on the ideas that dominated comparative literature at the time, they soon began to discuss the Polish writer’s ‘Argentinization’ as well as the main traits of his work. Besides Literal, these reflections also appeared in the novel Cancha rayada by Germán García. This approach does not rely on the aesthetics of the ‘novel as testimony,’ which were popular at the time. Instead, it accentuates the text rather than the writer (departing from the key paradigm of the day) and builds on Lacanian psychoanalysis.

ПОСТПОСТМОДЕРНИСТСКАЯ САМОРЕФЛЕКСИЯ В РОМАНЕ ПОЛА ОСТЕРА «СТЕКЛЯННЫЙ ГОРОД»

Author(s): Vera Borisovna Shamina / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2014

This paper addresses one of the most famous and disputable novels of the leading contemporary American author Paul Auster. Our aim is to reveal various forms of the author’s presence in the novel and to describe the aesthetic results of these multiple embodiments. We demonstrates how, using all major strategies of postmodernism, the author actually parodies it creating a metatext, which enables us to speak of a new stage of the development of postmodern fiction.

Film jako remedium na rzeczywistość. O motywie Piotrusia Pana w wybranych niezrealizowanych scenariuszach filmowych Stanisława Dygat

Author(s): Barbara Giza / Language(s): Polish Issue: 01/2015

The idea of this paper is to describe unrealizded screenplays of Stanisław Dygat. Those works are kept in the archives of Filmoteka Narodowa and show how much Dygat, one of the most famous Polish writers, was interested in film and how many trials to become a screenwriter he has undertaken. The idea here is to look for a very characteristic motive for Dygat’s prose – Peter Pan motive. The main hero in Dygat’s books is always like a big boy, trying to manage in the adult’s world, believing in magic and the power and illusion. Reading the unrealized screenplays being written by Dygat since late 40’s one can very easily find the same motive of Peter Pan, which shows the writer’s artistic consequence and his strong fascination of film as a new way of expression.

АНДРЕЙ ПЛАТОНОВ В ПОИСКАХ ЖАНРА

Author(s): Marina Vladimirovna Zavarkina / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 1/2016

The article studies the problem of genre in the literary works of A. Platonov. The viewpoint on the author’s manner of thinking as “genre busting” that is very popular in Platonov Studies is argued here. The article analyzes the main genres of his creative work: verses, a publicistic and literary-critical article, a story, a short novel, a novel, a play, a script, a fairy tale. The diversity of genres used by the author represents a certain way of self-expression chosen by the author strategically. As it is shown in the article, because of the problems with censorship A. Platonov modified the same ideas trying to introduce them in different genres for the purpose of applying to his readers. In the artistic heritage of A. Platonov it is possible to detect a genre system that allows us to outline the periods of his creative work, according to his genre preferences at a particular point in time. Genre diversity in the presence of a certain range of recurrent ideas confirms the viewpoint of the writer’s works as one text.

МОТИВ ВОЗВРАЩЕНИЯ БЛУДНОГО СЫНА В РОМАНАХ И. С. ТУРГЕНЕВА

Author(s): Valentina Gabdullina / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 1/2013

The author questions the perception of Ivan Turgenev as a “non- Christian writer” and studies the problem of the prodigal son motif functioning in a series of his novels. In his novels, Turgenev pictured different phases of the archetypal story, originating from the Gospel parable of the prodigal son. In the novel Rudin he depicted the phase of spiritual wanderings of the hero who had lost touch with his native land — Russia. In his next novels (Home of the Gentry, Fathers and Sons and Smoke), after leading his hero in circles and sending him back to his paternal home, Turgenev reconstructs the model of human behavior, represented in the parable, thereby recognizing the immutability of the idea formalized in the Gospel. The motif of the return to Russian land gets its completion in Turgenev's last novel Virgin Soil, in which the author paradoxically connects the Westernist idea with the Gospel imperative. Solomin, the son of a deacon, sent by his wise father out to Europe “to get education”, studies in England, masters the European knowledge and returns back “to his native land” to establish his own business in inland Russia. Thus, a series of Turgenev's novels, in which he portrayed different phases of social life, are interlinked with the motif of the prodigal son, who is represented by novels' main characters.

‘Global’ Identity or the (Ir)Reducible Other: The Cultural Logic of Global Identity in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Man with the Twisted Lip

Author(s): Jin Lee / Language(s): English Issue: 27/2016

After the Syrian civil war, deaths of those fleeing crisis areas have tragically become a regular news item. Not new to the world, however, such crises emerge from tensions between identity and difference as codified in international politics, whereby refugees and migrants become the Other and subject to unyielding universals, such as the law or narrow concepts of what is right. Indeed, the cultural logic of “global identities” informing the current refugee and migrant crisis seems recurrent, as exemplified in the recent cases of the Tamils from Sri Lanka and the Somalis. The cultural logic of global identity is also reflected in the popular nineteenth-century novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Twisted Lip, in which the main character disguises himself as a professional beggar to appeal to middle class values in order to incite their guilty consciences. Drawing on Ian Baucom, Marc Shell, and Jean-Joseph Goux, this article argues that the main character’s actions reflect and embody the cultural logic of the global politico-economy in late nineteenth century London. As such, Doyle’s novella illustrates the Derridean notion of hospitality by revealing that “identity and difference are mutually constitutive” (Baker 109) and offers insightful commentary on the current refugee and migrant crisis.

О восстановлении памятника матери Ф. М. Достоевского на бывшем Лазаревском кладбище в Москве

Author(s): Pavel Evgenyevich Fokin / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 1/2017

Maria Fyodorovna Dostoevskaya (nee Nechaeva), mother of the great writer, died on March 11th (February 27th), 1837. She was buried at the first public graveyard in Moscow — Lazarev cemetery, the largest one until 1917. In the 1930s this cemetery was ravaged, and the writer’s mother’s remains were subjected to a barbaric exhumation. The tombstone was kept for a long time in the cellar of the State Literary Museum. The given article covers the history of reconstruction of the tombstone of M. F. Dostoevskaya. This cultural and historical event occurred on March 11th, 2017 in the territory of the former Lazarev cemetery in Moscow, near the Holy Spirit Temple. The reconstruction of M. F. Dostoevskaya’s grave is not only the reconstruction of a place of memory of the Dostoevsky dynasty, but is also evocation of recollections of all the buried in the destroyed Lazarev cemetery.

Ekonomia ciała. Powieści Marty Syrwid

Author(s): Michał Sowiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1+2 (8)/2016

The paper “The Economics of Body: On Marta Syrwid’s Novels” aims, on the one hand, to sketch a portrait of the writer and place her within the space of the Polish literary field; on the other hand, it makes an attempt to interpret her first novel Zaplecze. The author of the text seek to break off with the dominant feminist existential perspective, in which Syrwid has been often inscribed by the critics. Instead, he proposes to view her writing as a continuation of the modern thinking (references are made to e.g. Kafka) about the subject in economic categories, that is as an impossible project of the complete breaking from and becoming independent of the outside reality.

ЕГИПЕТСКАЯ ТЕМА В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ А. П. ЧЕХОВА

Author(s): Elena Suzryukova / Language(s): English,Russian Issue: 2/2017

The present article deals with the biblical themes of the escape to Egypt and the exodus from Egypt as depicted in the narrative and the epistolary fiction of the writer. In the letters of A. P. Chekhov Egypt is associated with favorable living conditions for those who suffer from lung diseases. Besides, the author was taken with the idea of visiting this country, but his dream did not come true. In the early Anton Chekhov’s short story “Holiday” [“Prazdnichnye”] the motif of the escape to Egypt is put in a humorous context. The same motif along with the motif of the Exodus from Egypt was used by the author in the story “Men” [“Muzhiki”]. Both in the letters and in the stories and novels of the writer, the motif of the escape to Egypt keeps the Christian semantics of Salvation. In the short story “Misery” [“Toska”] Egypt is implicitly present — it is linked with the epigraph to the text, the basis for which is a spiritual verse “Weeping of Joseph, when his brothers sold him in Egypt”. The motif of being in Egyptian slavery — another aspect of the theme in question — translates into a number of works and letters of A. P. Chekhov. This motif is associated with the meanings of freedom and grief. The article reveals and analyses the antinomic images of St. Mary of Egypt and Cleopatra of Egypt. Besides, it explores semantic realization of the set expression “plague of Egypt”.

Potworni imigranci w Szatańskich wersetach Salmana Rushdiego. Przypadek Saladyna Czamczawalli

Author(s): Marta Taperek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2016

The case of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses allows Taperek to show how the cultural image of the migrant is constructed around notions of the monstrous and demonic. Discourses on the migrant show striking similarities with discourses on the monstrous in cultural practice and language. Drawing on postcolonial theory and deconstruction, Taperek analyses ways of representing the bodies and cultural identity of migrants in the literary text as well as in related visual representations. The ‘monstralization’ of the Other that results from the atavistic fear of the unknown is inscribed into the context of the current migrant crisis.

Co za wstyd! Pamiętnik z okresu queerowego dojrzewania: prolegomena

Author(s): Błażej Warkocki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

This article focuses on the short story ‘Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer’ from Witold Gombrowicz’s debut collection ‘Memoirs from a Time of Immaturity’ (later published under the title Bakakaj or Bacacay in the English translation). Warkocki reads this collection as a ‘memoir of negative affects,’ with the opening story being a story about shame. Drawing on Silvan Tomkins and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Warkocki suggests that shame is an affect that interpellates the identity of the outcast and the misfit. Thus the short story represents a particular instance of queer performativity.

Bezwstydny taniec nie może trwać bez końca

Author(s): Kinga Dunin / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

From a sociological perspective, shame is an instrument of social control, while shamelessness is a way to break out from under that control. One strategy of shamelessness is camp, both as a poetics and as a practice. Dunin’s analysis of Witold Gombrowicz’s short story ‘Lawyer Kraykowski’s Dancer’ as well as Michał Witkowski’s ‘life writing’ attempts to answer how effective this strategy is and to identify its limits.

Завръщане в Атон

Author(s): Lyubomir Georgiev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 01/2017

Orgia na dworcu w Jekaterinhofie. (O wytwarzaniu Inności w przekładach Idioty Dostojewskiego)

Author(s): Wojciech Tomasik / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

This article explores how Otherness is created in two Polish translations of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The analysis focuses on scenes whose localisation the Russian original describes as воксал (read: vauxhall, meaning ‘railway station’). This word first appears in the characterization of Anastassya Filippovna (in a sentence about her participation in the orgy at Yekaterinhof); later it is used consistently to describe the events set in Pavlovsk. The translations mention an orgy ‘at the station’ [na ‘dworcu’] in Yekaterinhof as well as concerts that drew the characters staying in Pavlovsk to the botanical gardens. This corresponds to the popular image of Russia as a land of the unforeseeable and of radical cultural difference. In the translations of The Idiot Russia is subject to ‘re-mapping’ (pushing away from us).

Archiwum i obraz: fragmenty historii traumatycznej według H.G. Adlera

Author(s): Dorota Głowacka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 5/2016

Głowacka’s article presents the writer and Holocaust survivor H. G. Adler, author of the first monograph on Theresienstadt concentration camp. The focus is on the early novels Panorama [Panorama] and Podróż [The Journey] – two fictional accounts of the writer’s experience at the Nazi camps to which he and his family were deported. Głowacka reads these novels through Walter Benjamin’s conceptualization of history as well as Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on the representability of the Holocaust. She compares Adler’s idiosyncratic use of visual representation to the painterly techniques of artists such as Fritta, Kien and Fleischmann, Adler’s fellow inmates at Theresienstadt.

Czarne słońce i błądzące planety – wokół „El Desdichado” Nervala

Author(s): Piotr Śniedziewski / Language(s): Polish Issue: 5/2016

This article explores the metaphor of the black sun in Gérard de Nerval’s works, in particular the famous sonnet ‘El Desdichado’ and the autobiographical fiction ‘Aurelia’. The French writer uses this metaphor in a variety of contexts (astronomical, religious, solar) in order to signal a melancholy crisis, which characterizes not only the lyrical subject in the sonnet or the narrator in the story, but also the writer himself. Śniedziewski points out the fact that Nerval’s metaphor, though it carries a distinctively subjective mark, also appears in many other works (by writers such as Jean-Paul, Heine, Gautier, Hugo) and is inscribed into Romantic attempts to define depressive states.

Praktyki kontrfaktualne w narracjach naukowych i fikcjonalnych

Author(s): Małgorzata Sugiera / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2017

This article deals with counter-factual practices in history and the historical novel (whose production has increased in the last few years, and which presents alternative versions of the past), as well as in areas where the humanities and the natural or exact sciences intersect with works of literary fiction that incorporate elements of science fiction. Based on a selection of mockumentary works by respected academics from various disciplines, Sugiera demonstrates the essential function that these practices have in undermining the objectivity of academic discourses and in highlighting the fact that knowledge is situated.

Fanfiction a funkcjonowanie literatury popularnej. Zarys perspektywy historycznej

Author(s): Aldona Kobus / Language(s): Polish Issue: 03/2013

An essay attempting to trace an early history of fan fiction, taking it not only as a production of fandom’s artefacts but also as a pop cultural strategy of creation, a very part of reception and function of popular literature. Studying examples of the early fandoms, such as Jane Austen’s and Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, their fan-made sequels and other works based on their output and their position as a part of official publishing market, the text tries to undermine narrow understanding fan fiction as very young and subversive part of modern culture. It focuses also on specific situation of collective writing and grassroots distribution of so called “weird fiction” at the beginning of 20th century upon studying the case of H. P. Lovecraft’s novels. By comparison of status of fan‐written stories at the beginning of the century and in the late 60s, it queries about changes not only on the publishing market but also in our understanding of authorship and literary work, the function of intertextuality in popular culture and stigmatisation of fan‐written works.