Schulz. Antonycz. Vogel Wyobrażanie. Doganianie. Pamiętanie
Schulz. Antonycz. Vogel. Imagining. Catching Up. Remembering

Summary/Abstract: By comparing and analysing three important representatives of modernist literature – Bruno Schulz, Bohdan Ihor Antonycz, and Debora Vogel – the author reflects on Lwów, Drohobych, and Galicia, conceived as a source of the consonance of their aesthetic ideas and literary works. Despite living and working in the same space and time the three protagonists of the presented essay never sat down at the same table in a literary club, café, or university hall; nonetheless, concentration on art and the need of a systemic and structured expression of their creative theories bind them together the most. The social, artistic, literary, and intellectual Zeitgeist of Galicia during the inter-war period creates, according to the author’s convictions, a fertile perspective for a certain revision and rethinking of (non) concurrent points between important figures and ideas of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish culture. This perspective consists of surveying invisible intersubjective links, which despite the fact that they are not created upon the basis of contact are the outcome of the exceptional atmosphere of a curious cultural intersection between two world wars; they are the produce of a post-factum, or rather a post scriptum, intersection – the outcome of meeting in the wake of writing, a contemporary reception, and a new canon of juxtapositions. The independence of auteur creative myths, the invention of a new language, the blurring of the limits of the potential of that language, a distinctive and universal synaesthesia, and an eternal background of their first artistic text (be it prose or poetry), articles, essays, prefaces or letters in which they explain, conceptualise, and manifest their the ory of creativity – this is what fundamentally and basically links Schulz, Antonycz, and Vogel. Each of the three auteur theories is based on the path and experience of classical modernism; sometimes it is the outcome of civilizational processes of modernisation based on the theoretical-intellectual context of the time, but to a large extent it remains also the produce of local existence, i.e. that which we may admittedly describe as the mythologization of one’s beloved and favourite town, the primeval world of one’s imagery and cognition, which in the case of Schulz, Antonycz, and Vogel possess assorted external-aesthetic symptoms but, nonetheless, harmonize and echo in a fundamental approach to the nature of art as a modernistic synthetic actualisation of the auteur myth or, more simply, the world of the author. The author of the presented essay divides it into chapters in whose titles he successively makes use of combinations of three key words: imagining, catching up, remembering. These metaphorical conceits are dual: on the one hand, interest is focused on the three authors – after all, they originate from their conception of creativity. On the other hand, we are dealing with an embodiment of auteur, subjective research, and to a great extent a personal view of the rediscovery and re-reading of their oeuvre. It is precisely in this manner that the presented essay was construed: a research synthesis enforced with the reader’s personal experience, while the private reception contact becomes conceptualised, turning into a wider generalisation of the intellectual-aesthetic atmosphere personified by three significant figures – Schulz, Antonycz, and Vogel.

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