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In 2020, a book of early proses by Richard Weiner was published under the title Přetržená nit a jiné rané prózy. In response to this publication we made an interpretation of selected texts focused on Weiner’s typical topics and motives. Our goals were to find specifics about this Weiner’s creative phase and try to make a reflection about question “How important are these early texts for author‘ s literary work as a whole.“
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Victorious Fall (1929) is the first novel by the Czech-born Slovak author Petr Jilemnický (1901–1949). The novel reflects the motives of "misery" and "beauty" of Kysuce. Literary historiography perceives novel in regard to Expressionism (J. Števček, 1983) and Lyricism (F. Miko, 1969; J. Števček, 1973). The paper points to the distinct metaphorical, imaginative nature and semantic ambiguity of the novel. Despite the criticisms of the DAV group, Peter Jilemnický was a member of the group, Victorious Fall features many stylistic and expressive principles related to the aesthetics of the Czech avantgarde program Poetism. The novel represents a contact between literary tradition and innovative stylistic techniques. The use of lyrical tendencies demonstrates the adoption of the poetic quality of Slovak literature in a response to the crisis of the prose in the first half of the 20. century. Victorious Fall proves the artistic pursuit of Peter Jilemnický for a new novel form.
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The study is focused on the novel by Daniela Kapitáňová: Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book. The goal is to analyze the moments found in the book: first, the cemetery motif, dark humour and danse macabre, then specifics of the region and its society and last the mystified narrator playing with authenticity.
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On the international literary scene Samuel Beckett has, to a considerable degree, established himself as a connoisseur of nothingness. Although this fact manifests itself primarily through his dramas, even a cursory glance at Beckett’s prosaic works would allow the reader to uncover mentioned problem in an unapologetically explicit context. This work is devoted to the outlining of the essence of nothingness in Samuel Beckett’s collection Texts for Nothing. Based on the series of thirteen texts, it analyzes the core of the named concept not only from the semantical and contextual viewpoints, but also linguistically. The language is being put under scrutiny both in terms of the narrator’s language competence and, generally, as a phenomenon and namely as the contour for delineatingthe essence of the notion as abstract as “nothing” – if not innately given, then obtained in the process of interpretation. The analysis also takes into the account such problematic aspects as the assumed, inherently impossible expression of nothingness and the failure of verbalization brought about by such a process.
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This essay offers an analysis of the rhetoric of the dispute between Irzykowski and Witkacy that takes into account both artists’ strong statements of opinions as an indication of their hidden recurring resentments. In the essay, the dispute is interpreted as a duel between two unrecognised intellectuals accusing each other of anachronisms and honouring themselves with a label of a precursor. What is more, the author of the essay points out how the nature of this psychomachy-like dispute manifests itself with a constant violation of by and large accepted ethical norms of an artistic dispute of which the two were eager proponents.
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The article is a detailed analysis of Karol Irzykowski’s review of the poetic collection "Łąka" (1920) by Bolesław Leśmian. It reconstructs the criteria used by the critic to evaluate Leśmian’s book and studies Irzykowski’s discourse built upon an antinomy between “dobre wiersze” (“good poems”) and “wierszęta” (“poor little poems”). As the analysis reveals, Irzykowski’s argumentation served to a significant degree as a self explicationof critic’s personal aesthetic experience.
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The article presents three threads of the reception of Irzykowski’s works in Lviv in the 1930s concerning: the dispute on the role of intellectuals, the accusations of anti-Semitism, and Irzykowski’s theory of cinema. The cultural and literary environment of interwar Lviv did not accept Irzykowski’s intellectual indefiniteness and political independence. Irzykowski himself treated politics as an aesthetic rather than social space, which met with resistance of various circles.
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The article analyzes complex relations between Karol Irzykowski (1874–1944) and Jan Emil Skiwski (1894–1956). Skiwski was one of the most outstanding literary critics in prewar Poland and also one of the most active and demanding polemists of Irzykowski. Skiwski described himself as clerc i.e. independent intellectual, but as his polemics proved he understood intellectual independency quite differently than Irzykowski did. By his witty and often malicious concepts Skiwski also forced Irzykowski to explain his intellectual positions. Their quarrel had quite unexpected outcome: in the name of independency Skiwski collaborated with Germans during the Second World War and he also saluted Irzykowski after his death in 1944 in a collaborationist newspaper “Przełom”.
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In this article, the author aims to analyse Irzykowski’s selected statements concerning Jewish subject, especially the participation of Jews in culture and the Irzykowski’s personal relations with Jews. The author tries to answer why some of Karol Irzykowski’s articles from the 1930s were considered anti-Semitic and how these texts related to Irzykowski’s philosophy of intellectual independence.
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The purpose of this sketch is to present the most important features of the model of “clercism” according to Irzykowski, especially those that prove its originality and distinctiveness. The starting point is an analysis of what qualities Irzykowski looked for in potential “clercs” and from what groups of intellectuals he chose potential adepts. The point of arrival is an attempt to distinguish Irzykowski’s individual vision among other models of clercism.
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The aim of the article is to characterize the situation of Karol Irzykowski in the interwar period and his paradoxical – because it took place in the circumstances of the critic’s extraordinary activity – loneliness. The frustration and bitterness of the critic, which finds diary documentation, is shown as the result of social and professional disappointments (the backstage of parting with literary magazines, the way Irzykowski functioned at PAL, failures on the literary awards market, the unsatisfactory work of a parliamentary stenographer). The dialectic of isolation and engagement is presented as a consequence of 1) Irzykowski’s personality traits, 2) the concept of literary criticism, based on the postulate of merciless unmasking of mental prejudices and developed by him already in the Young Poland period, 3) the necessary response to the epistemological and ethical foundations of the clerc’s worldview.
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