Przed tajemnicą
Before the Secret

Summary/Abstract: Franaszek discusses the process of producing a biography. Drawing on accounts of other biographers as well as his own experience writing about the life and work of Czesław Miłosz and Zbigniew Herbert he asks what qualities mark a good biographer; he also discusses the specificity of the most important sources (such as a writer’s archives or witness accounts). For Franaszek, a literary biography is situated in a space between academic writing and literature. Finally he explores the tenstion between the “objectivism” that is more or less available to the biographer and the readers’ expectations, which the biographer often fails to meet.

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