„Gdzie pająki i kruki”. Rzecz o serii „Menażeria”
“Where Spiders and Ravens”: on the “Menażeria” Series

Summary/Abstract: In recent years, and in the face of a sixth mass-scale extinction of assorted species, it is possible to observe a proliferation of publications about the relations between man and Nature. The awareness that we had crossed a critical point after which it is impossible to reverse numerous effects of the anthropocene – an era in which man is the prime force shaping the geological and natural processes of the planet – had permeated literature and philosophy already several decades ago. Suffice to evoke texts by such authors as John Berger, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, who from the early 1980s treated man’s relations with other animals as a problem. “Nature writing”, present in English literature for almost 200 years, is flourishing also in Polish conditions, as evidenced by the “Menażeria” series issued by the Czarne publishing house. One of the authors in this series is Robert Pucek, who describes the multiplicity of animals, reflects on language vis a vis the material nature of the world, and poses questions about the limits of cognition, writing about the “taxonomic obsession”, which reveals incessant attempts at permeating the mystery of existence. By transcending anthropocentric perception Pucek combines descriptions of the pluralism of beings with elegiac reflection on the vanishing of numerous species of insects.

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