Samotność klerka
The Loneliness of Clerc

Author(s): Sylwia Panek
Subject(s): Cultural history, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Interwar Period (1920 - 1939)
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: interwar period; clerkism; modernism; literary criticism; Karol Irzykowski; polemics of the interwar period
Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to characterize the situation of Karol Irzykowski in the interwar period and his paradoxical – because it took place in the circumstances of the critic’s extraordinary activity – loneliness. The frustration and bitterness of the critic, which finds diary documentation, is shown as the result of social and professional disappointments (the backstage of parting with literary magazines, the way Irzykowski functioned at PAL, failures on the literary awards market, the unsatisfactory work of a parliamentary stenographer). The dialectic of isolation and engagement is presented as a consequence of 1) Irzykowski’s personality traits, 2) the concept of literary criticism, based on the postulate of merciless unmasking of mental prejudices and developed by him already in the Young Poland period, 3) the necessary response to the epistemological and ethical foundations of the clerc’s worldview.

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