W cudzysłowie. O literaturze polskiej XX i XXI wieku
In quotes. On the Polish literature of the 20th and 21st century

Author(s): Iwona Gralewicz-Wolny
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: contemporary Polish poetry; contemporary Polish prose; 20th century; 21st century
Summary/Abstract: The book consists of twelve interpretative essays which relate the author’s close encounters with the Polish literature of the 20th and 21st century. The publication opens with a micrological look into the poetry of Bolesław Leśmian as a story of the simultaneous power and misery of life, which by being embodied in an infinite number of forms ensures permanence of existence to none of these forms. The subsequent essay is a reading, guided by poetics, of the ideological poems of Władysław Broniewski, whose layer of content admittedly lost their appeal but they continue to enchant the reader with their masterly form which conceals both the mystery of their contemporary success with the readers as well as the reason for the present interest of the researchers in these poems. In the text that follows the author suggests a shared reading of a Władysław Sebyła poem which begins with *** [„Jesteśmy gnojem, mój bracie...”] (*** [“We are the muck, my brother…”]), here treated as a subtle counterpoint to the dark tone of the entire oeuvre of the author of the “Koncert egotyczny” (“An egotistical concert”). A return to the micrological perspective is featured in the article devoted to the works of Anna Kamieńska, in which the poet demonstrates a particular sensibility to small everyday things as a source of the answers to the questions about the sense of the existence of the world, of man and of God. The two subsequent chapters of the book are devoted to the works of Miron Białoszewski as a poet of transgression who consistently observes and deconstructs all patterns that he encounters. The protagonist of the two texts which follow is Wisława Szymborska as the author of the poem entitled “Mikrokosmos” (“Microcosmos”), which is one of the instances of proof, presented in the book, that she is fond of the world of micromatter and that she is a precursor of posthumanist thought in the context of Polish modern poetry. The final text which refers to poetry is an analysis of the volume by Ewa Lipska entitled “Drugi zbiór wierszy” (“Second collection of poems”), in which ironic notes resonate against the background of bitter diagnoses of modernity, enabling the reader to maintain distance toward the existential pitfalls which endanger both the individual and the community. The problems of the three final chapters, devoted to the accomplishments of Ryszard Kapuściński, Jacek Dehnel and Halszka Opfer in the field of prose, oscillate around the category of truth and fiction associated with the problem of the relation about the present time and the past time, the testimony of memory or the horizon of readerly expectations toward the text.

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