„Sól ziemi”, czyli tęsknota do eposu
“Salt of the Earth” (“Sól ziemi”), or Longing for the Epic Story

Summary/Abstract: The aritcle is an attempt at interpreting Józef Wittlin’s “Salt of the Earth” in the context of the epic story’s historical semantics and the novel investigated not as much as regards their formal construction but the original connections with the different cultural formations which as superior “macrostructures” define the conditions of the authentic functioning of those artistic forms. In his analyses the author refers to Hegel’s aesthetic views and Lukács’ “Theory of the Novel.” He asserts that Wittlin’s novel is of internally antinomic and intentionally equivocal structure: it is set between an attempt at reviving the epic story as a form that corresponds to “closed culture” and a need to be a novel form peculiar to culture in which “totality of the world” is no longer accessible. It results in the construction of the narrator who wants to be an epic story aoidos but cannot be one in the world alien to him.

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