Pamięć Saturna
The Memory of Saturn

Melancholic Past in the Prose of Intellectual Squaring (1946–1948)

Summary/Abstract: The theme of the paper is the prose of intellectual squaring of 1946–1948 (K. Brandys’ “Drewniany koń <The Wooden Horse>,” S. Kisielewski’s “Sprzysiężenie <Conspiracy>,” P. Hertz’s “Sedan <Sedan>,” S. Dygat’s “Jezioro Bodeńskie <Lake Constance>,” and S. Otwinowski’s “Nagrobek <Tombstone>”). The postwar literary criticism interpreted the novels through the prism of Marxist ideology, seeing in them only attempts to define the role of intelligence in the conditions of historical breakthrough. Taking advantage of the category of melancholy, the paper enriches the trend’s traditional understandings with a new context and rehabilitates the intellectual pictured in them. It concentrates on the protagonists’ work of memory the aim of which is to overcome the temporality of human being and to tame the fear-fuelling present. Intellectuals are joined by a typically melancholic state of deficiency resulting from the fact that they lost their past and that they ceased to live in the world the sense of which is easily perceptible.

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