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This article constitutes an attempt at organising the non-conservative tendencies in Polish essays published in the 21st century, which apply to themes, the lowering of the tone, and forms of writing. One major stream is travel writing, which focuses not on the Mediterranean legacy, but on the ‘second world’: long-disadvantaged provincial areas. Many essayists abandon the traditional topic of books and works of art, and turn to ‘reading’ the animal world, the plant world, and the world of ordinary objects. The essay has also become a tool for introducing polarisation between that which is mainstream and that which is marginal and concerns minorities. The fact of choosing a non-traditional topic often entails a non-canonical cognitive attitude, which translates into experiments within the area of the form of expression. The author of this article argues that all those innovations can be accommodated by the flexible convention of the essay as a genre which, in principle, is supposed to constitute an artistic cognitive experiment.
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The article contains considerations on Marek Bieńczyk’s literary output and his book Kontener, published in 2018. All essays from the volume manifest their autobiographical and literary character. The main aim of the paper is to make a diagnosis connected with the particular and common (mis)understanding of the relations between death and life, mourning and vitality, melancholy and literature. This objective is accomplished through essay strategies. In texts that are part of Kontener, the suggestive and expressive subject makes continual new inquiries in order to find the essence of their (Bieńczyk’s) personal, and especially textual, identity.
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The article concerns a critical book by Stefan Chwin and Stanisław Rosiek, titled Bez autorytetu, which is treated as an example of the process of a certain turn in the Polish modern literature of the end of the 20th century. The author discusses the basic assumptions of critical concepts and indicates the questionable places of the problem structure emerging from those assumptions. In so doing, he treats Bez autorytetu as a form of a modern essay which developed in the conditions of mature modernism, which was reflected in the various attempts at transcending modernistic conditions, both formal and conceptual.
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This article discusses the special kind of Holocaust essay which, on the one hand, remains in opposition to academic texts and, on the other, is a text which resembles an autobiography, and which reveals its author’s personal engagement in the discussed problem. By analysing Jan Tomasz Gross’ study titled Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej..., ale go nie lubię and its consecutive printed versions, the author of this article discusses the benefit of engaging in essay-writing for the scholar, who fluctuates between the academic and non-academic discourses. To this end, she also discusses other Polish Holocaust essays published in the mid-1980s (by, e.g., Jan Błoński and Roman Zimand) and the theory of the essay by Theodor W. Adorno, which triggered Gross’ formal and notional search.
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The article presents an analysis of the essayistic knowledge about genocide. For this purpose, the author used works by Martin Pollack. Further, the article indicates the intertwining of two threads in Pollack’s prose. The first one is the history of his family, recollections about Nazi relatives, and the dissonance which formed inside him regarding his family’s past. The other one is the study of space understood as uncovering its “contamination”, the sinister past which has marked the specific portion of the landscape. The aim of the article is to check whether it is possible to decontaminate, i.e. expunge that contamination from these landscapes in order to make them once again locations which foster life rather than are mere empty cemeteries.
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The article discusses the problem of the theory and practice of contemporary Serbian feminist essay. The text indicates how – at the turn of the 21st century – the essay participated in the reading of the nationalist culture of fear during the breakup of Yugoslavia, how it became the tool for creating an analytical and methodological platform and a means of quick anthropological and cultural diagnoses, as well as a form of transfer of social or philosophical notions. This new strategy of the essay was illustrated through the examples of books by Svetlana Slapšak, a leading figure of the (sub)genre in the Serbian culture, a professor of cultural anthropology, classical philologist, and feminist critic: Mala crna haljina. Eseji o antropologiji i feminizmu (1993/2007, Little Black Dress. Essays on Anthropology and Feminism), Ženske ikone XX veka (2001, Female Icons of the 20th Century), Ženske ikone antičkog sveta (2006, Female Icons of the Antiquity), Antička miturgija: žene (2013, Antique Mythurgy: Women). It becomes clear that one of the trends of the contemporary essay in the Serbian and post-Yugoslav cultures is the application of the genre in the spirit of modern engaged humanities and textual intervention.
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The medallions devoted to Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Ribera are a major collection of texts within Gustaw Herling-Grudziński’s entire output. Through them, he proved that he was able to write a moving text about painting while avoiding both the academic tone and flaunting his knowledge, as well as the dangers of ekphrasis transforming too often into irksome detailed inventories of the elements of a painter’s presentation. The decision to refer to these texts as medallions was equally a genological concept and a clever hedge, and a starting point for a discussion on the ambiguity of the very notion of a medallion. Herling-Grudziński would not have been himself if he had abandoned autobiographical reflections. When considering artists and their works ‘from aside’, he multiplied assumptions, proposed apocryphal versions of some biographical threads, and formulated bold unverifiable hypotheses – this was because he sided with a literary story, not an academic discourse.
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The paper focuses on the essayistic output of Joanna Pollakówna, a poet and a historian of art, an author of several books of sketches devoted to European painting. It draws attention to the necessity of reading her poetry and essays – which are inseparable and illuminate one another – in a parallel way. The first part of the article analyses the way of treating art typical of Pollakówna: the experience of reception which reveals the following of the illumination, the awareness of significance, and mystery. The paper shows that the poet’s strategy towards the mystery of beauty consists in launching the empathic imagination capable of capturing the fleeting experience which seems to escape. The response to painting – which goes beyond the level of interpretation and chooses ‘adding’ rather than cataloguing meanings – is treated, after Didi-Huberman, as “capturing through the visible”, which leads to “producing and transforming”. The second part of the article is devoted to selected essays which manifest the transition from the intuition of mystery to the in-depth and creative answer of imagination: imagination following not only the work of art, but also the artist, the interesting relationship between them. References are made, for instance, to the private archive of the poet and her notes from art galleries. The reception of Pollakówna’s work is discussed in the conclusion of the paper. Quoting the voices of critics and the private correspondence of the poet with editors (which remains unpublished), one may argue that the essayistic method of the poet has been both acclaimed and not comprehended.
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This text is an attempt at repaying the author’s debt (both as an academic intellectual and as a regular reader) towards two inspiring essayists: Marta Piwińska and Józef Czapski. From the latter, the author of the article gained a lesson in establishing an intimate relationship with a work of literature he reads or a painting he views. From Piwińska he learnt the poetics of a mentally disciplined essay and gained the ability to associate the readings of the literature of the Polish Romanticism with contemporary sensitivity and the grand works of high modernism of the 20th century. In this article, the author analysed the records of fragments of the life and artistic struggles included in eight essays by Czapski (from the Patrząc and Czytając collections) as well as extensive essays with a literary studies’ focus by Piwińska (from books: Złe wychowanie and Juliusz Słowacki od duchów). The author focussed on the essayistic studies of the experiences of lostness and tiredness, the work of the mind, eyes and other senses, of spiritual and intellectual surprises, and even of moments of clairvoyance. He esteems the discussed essays particularly highly due to their exploratory value, which often takes the form of micro-stories, and elliptical and condensed biographical outlines. In these, readers are offered specific figures of artists and people engaged in everyday hustle and bustle. Both these groups encounter experiences which could be referred to as cornerstone lessons in existence.
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The founders of the first literary café in reborn Poland, namely ‘Pikador’ in Warsaw, chose a poem by Jan Lechoń for the inauguration ceremony in November 1918. In the poem, titled Mochnacki, the young poet recollects a historical concert of Maurycy Mochnacki, a Romantic tribune of the 19th-century Warsaw, a pianist and a writer. Different possibilities of interpretation of the work, which is heavily emotional – ranging from patriotic poetry, through an almost social satire to an intimate confession encoded in the form of a description of a piano concert and reactions of the foreign audience to it – are not contradictory as they complement each other well.
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The paper focuses on the figure of Maria Morska, a reciter dubbed “Skamander muse”, who had a versatile and multifaceted impact on the literary circles of her day. I am conducting the quest for the artist (elusive today in the face of scarce biographical sources) through interpreting the poems for which she was a magnet and a centre (i.e. Inwokacja by Antoni Słonimski and Groteska by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz). The image of Morska emerging from them presents a very original figure: one that was admired and received intensely. The poetic inscriptions of the impression which the Skamander muse made often bring to mind the reception of works of art. Morska refines commonness into a metaphor. Her literary image is a testimony to a moment of delight, dazzle, and – perhaps more importantly – spontaneous, artistic co-participation. She inspires one to look for pseudonyms and roles which would be capable of expressing the impression that accompanied her – one of changeability, glimmer, being different, never being the same.
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The author of the article deals with the poetic newspaper debut of Irena Tuwim (1898-1987), an outstanding author and translator of children’s literature, but also a poet who is forgotten or read only on the margin of the literary output of her brother, Julian Tuwim (1894-1953). The poem titled Panienka (A Maiden), published in Godzina Polski in 1916, is hereby subjected to a contextual analysis and referred to other poems by Irena Tuwim as well as confronted with her existence, also in the auto-emancipatory dimension.
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The article offers a reconstruction of the text-based fight between Adolf Nowaczyński and Antoni Słonimski. It was not, as it is argued here, only a contest of styles and temperaments – though this exchange proved one of the most impressive, powerful, and dramatic polemics of that time in terms of articulation. However, it stemmed from a long history of tumultuous contacts which offered an amplified view of the problems of identity (Jewishness), politics, and community. A comprehensive view of the combat between Nowaczyński and Słonimski requires both an analysis of the rhetorics of the texts and an investigation into the context and dynamics of publication.
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Having written The Joke, Kundera changed the modus vivendi of the novel’s narrator who, with time, became a separate protagonist. This is connected with the appearance of the ellipsis as the main plot device, which is not yet present in The Joke. This change in the way of narrating represents another and, perhaps, a deeper dividing line in Kundera’s writing than switching to another language (from Czech to French), the change of the setting (from Czechoslovakia to Western countries) and the change of the political system (from communist to ‘imagological’) as an instrument of oppression.
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Włodzimierz Kirchner (1875-1970) – former priest, activist in the Łódź and Warsaw districts of the Christian Charity Association, he supported the efforts of the organisation by publishing articles on philanthropy. He was a proponent of the so-called ‘enlightened philanthropy’, i.e. he argued that social support cannot be of a spontaneous and chaotic character, but, rather, it should be controlled and monitored so that unemployment can be prevented. To justify his theses, the main of which was a conviction that giving alms was a waste of money and a tool spreading demoralisation, he conducted an analysis of dysfunctional communities, e.g. Bałuty (near Łódź back then). He depicted the inhabitants of the area (serving as a synecdoche of the dysfunctional communities throughout Poland) as a group of pretenders and impostors hustling potential benefactors by using a theatricalisation of behaviours which evoked empathy. He collected and published his conclusions in the brochure titled Walka z nędzą na Bałutach, which – due to its controversial recommendations of emotional restraint and the application of the method of control and monitoring – stirred aversion among various groups of intellectuals. Kirchner was accused of blind support of doctrines and extreme aestheticism, while the leftist press accused him of hypocrisy typical of the clergy.
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The imagination of Antoni Szandlerowski in his collection of letters to Helena Beatus (Confiteor), his beloved one, is dominated by black. The aim of this article is to show that this colour plays a major role in Confiteor therefore it is used be the author most of the times. When he writes about how pure and beautiful Helena Beatus is, he uses metaphors such as: black dove, black iris, dark cloud, dark corridor. It shows how pessimistic about the future and how guilty about the love he felt Antoni Szandlerowski was. The internal conflict was caused by the will to fulfil as a lover and the duty to continue priestly services. Antoni Szandlerowski is full of doubts. He misses Helena Beatus and feels that he cannot be happy without her. On the other hand, he knows that they cannot make their desire to live side by side real. Since the world is a place of pain and misery where the love cannot thrive due to social norms, lovers can bind together only after death. This way of thinking led Szandlerowski to many neurological disorders, caused nightmares and a painful impression that the whole world around fades away. Szandlerowski uses symbols such as a black dove and a black iris to describe his beloved one and to show the dichotomy of his perception. Therefore love is the source of all the pain and suffering for him.
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The article is devoted to the first Łódź-based literary group called ‘Meteor’, which operated in 1928-1930. The author mainly focuses on providing a reliable discussion of the circumstances of the establishing of the group by its founders, i.e. Grzegorz Timofiejew, Marian Piechal, and Kazimierz Sowiński, and a careful specification of its programme. She also interpreted the Meteor’s works, i.e. revolutionist literary texts published in the Czasopismo Poetyckie Meteor, created by the members of the group.
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The paper is a multifaceted and contextual attempt at discussing the anthology of Polish literary essay in the version proposed by Jan Tomkowski in the edition of Biblioteka Narodowa (Series I, no. 329). It is also an essay on this essay anthology.
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