Zapiski z (przechodniości) bezradności
Notes from (transitivity of) helplessness

Summary/Abstract: Zapiski z nocnych dyżurów by Jacek Baczak (1995) has frequently been interpreted as a transgressive text both in that it neglects the ban on portraying the human suffering and in that the author deploys suffering of others to his own aesthetic goals. Still this is an unprecedented book in Polish literature, and to this day has not found followers. In Zapiski the author takes note of pain, suffering and solitude of the chronically ill, dying in a nursing home. Yet what he takes note of in fact is his own, and theirs, helplessness towards fate, attempting vainly to trace the innominate „Perpetrator”. His text stands out the exiguous Polish canon of literature on nursing and old people’s homes, ranging from Grochowiak to Sieniewicz.

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