Doświadczenie i Modernizm (wstęp)
Experience and Modernism (foreword)

Summary/Abstract: Having assumed that analysis of the language of art and divulgence of the conventionality of representations of the reality are the determinants of modernity in the arts, the avant-garde has virtually eliminated historical experience as part of its area of interest. As a result, the language of literature and modern (avant-garde) art proved impotent against the major historical experience of the twentieth century, that is, mass-scale genocide initiated by the Bolshevik revolution. The experience, once lost for the radical (post)modernist art in the former half of the century, has only been reconstructed through writings on the Holocaust and World-War-II genocides. The condition for all those records has namely been the assumption of extra-textuality of historical experience, entailing inviolability of the category of the truth that verifies the basic sense, rather than a value, of any such writings. Historical experience proves to be the key element making the eastern-European modernism different from the American or western-European modernism.

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