Zagłada gatunków według Wiktora Woroszylskiego – czyli (nie) więcej niż egzemplifikacja
A Holocaust of Genres According to Wiktor Woroszylski or (No) More than Exemplification

Summary/Abstract: The paper is a multicontextual interpretation of Wiktor Woroszylski’s poem “Zagłada gatunków” (“A Holocaust of Genres”), written in 1966 and published four years later in a volume under the same title. The author of the paper relates the piece to the realia and circumstances in which it was composed (including the anti-Semitic ambiance), compares it to Woroszylski’s other pieces, especially to the silva rerum autobiographical prose “Literatura. Powieść” (“Literature. A Novel,” 1977), and moves on to prove that the poem foreruns the consideration about the analogy drawn between the mechanisms of exclusion of some ethnic groups leading to their extermination and permission to kill animals. Stressing the significance of the innovative in its time and now falsely forgotten book by Antonina Leńkowa “Oskalpowana Ziemia” (“Scalped Earth,” 1961) to which Woroszylski directly refers, the author of the paper points at the timelessness and strength of the poem to the literary studies reflection over the Anthropocene (the poem can even be thought of as the first Polish piece to reflect on the issue), it interestingly resonates with the works by, inter alia, Ewa Bińczyk, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Elizabeth Kolbert, and at the same time preserves the relics of anthropocentric optics, giving insight into the limits of collective and individual memory. Nonetheless, in subversive reading it proves to be a powerful voice for deanthropocentrisation of genocide studies.

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