SPOTKANIE
A MEETING

ON SUBSTORIES IN LEO LIPSKI’S PROSE

Author(s): Hanna Gosk
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Lipski; Piotruś; narrative volume; Koselleck; substory; presence of the past
Summary/Abstract: Using Lipski’s novel "Piotruś", the author analyses narratives introduced to Lipski’s prose as a story within a story, like substories heard by the narrator-hero or like his own memories, recurring in his mind or told to the others. She argues that the substories stem from the meeting of the past with the present of the after-war world, which has lost its old framework, but has not established the new one. Substories – thanks to their fragmentary, digressive, open character – make the form of the whole work broader, corresponding to the images of the world without a model description. They show the narrator-hero suspended between the traumatic past and unwanted, devoid of future prospects, present. The “past presence” (a term by Reinhart Koselleck) is of special importance in those narratives.

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