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Based on theoretical models adopted from Postcolonial Studies, this study outlines a poetics of migration literature that sets it apart from the tradition of Russian emigration literature. Taking into account recent prose narratives by contemporary writers born in Russia but with a migration background (Marija RYBAKOVA, Julya RABINOWICH), it demonstrates that intercultural constellations are not only a central theme of these texts but an aesthetic principle that dominates all levels of the writing. The newly created marginal and transitional spaces become the very centres of creative innovation, where a cultural hybridization of the opposite poles East and West can be reached. Migrant experiences and transcultural existences open up new literary spaces for cultural and political self-reflection that transcend the narrow horizon of a self-enclosed national literature and create a new “world literature”.
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Jenny Erpenbecks Roman Heimsuchung (2008) entfaltet episodisch zwölf Biographien vor dem Hintergrund der deutschen Historie des 20. Jahrhunderts, seiner Umbrüche und geschichtlichen Zäsuren. Der multiperspektivische Roman macht Geschichte als Geschichten lesbar und valorisiert geschichtliche Erfahrung im Kontext von Heimat-Konzepten und Erinnerung. Ausgehend von dem topographischen Zentrum des Romans, einem Grundstück in der märkischen Provinz und dem darauf erbauten Haus, untersucht der Beitrag die literarische Konstruktion von Heimat und die Bedeutung von Orten für die Erinnerung.
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Our brief foray into the analyses of a subordinate character of Mihail Sebastian’s first play aims to exceed the simple emphasise of his rather over-simplified comic role to the proposal of a myth-criticism approach. It suggests that the apparent merry Major could be considered as a literary manifestation of a European everlasting grievous archetype, that of the Fisher King, both in its old Arthurian noble symbolism and its late decaying significance from Eliot’s The Waste Land. Jeff has the role of the immature confused boy who is in love with a young woman. He experiences an attraction which is never-ending, paralyzing, swallowing-up and impossible either to repress or to express. He is an unfit and helpless mute witness of the love story that is unfolding between the two grownups and protagonists, Corina and Ştefan Valeriu. He may also be regarded as a variable face of the mature hero, not in opposition, but in an intricate comrade relation. His “coming into being” experience may or may not develop into the failure outcome of the grownup. Madame Vintilă, an honest human being in her own way, yet mediocre and ordinary, rather frivolous, is a deconstruction of the feminine ideal. A mature woman, loquacious and voluptuous, who is presumably living back home a drab, petty life is looking for a way to unleash her sexual bedevils and accomplish her turbid dreams during a month of holyday. Agneş is outlined by means of her continuous absence from the stage, thus the young Hungarian servant becomes “a false diminutive Godot” of the play. Mister and Misses is an intruding risible couple that stands for the “real world” outside, thus invading like a morbid plague the chimeric realm of the holyday play. Their appearance stands for the ultimate confrontation between the two incompatible worlds, i.e. the sterility of the bourgeois quotidian and the escape into the phantasm. From this point onward the doom of the holyday ship is decided: the distress in the melancholy harbor where it left from.
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Translated from the French by Joanna Leszek. The sketch by Jean-Philippe Hashold answers the question posed by W. Wydra in the title of his book, and repeated by Hashold: the answer touched the problem of showing to the Teutonic Knights and Europe the Polish religiosity with the special emphasis on Mary being the patron saint of this knightly order.
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The analysis attempts a definition of the lines of dependency which the work by Jacek Podsiadło (the leading poet of the „bruLion” generation) shares with the tradition of the broadly understood American culture. The abovementioned "network of influences" shows how strongly the poet's imagination is inspired and led by what may be called his permanent fascination with the American way of life and, also, the "spiritual" and "pop" versions of American heritage.
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The first part of the article presents the tradition in which music is linked with metaphysics and the numerical model of understanding the world, as well as discusses the issues connected to number symbolism and to gematria. Subsequent to that, the paper refers to the way Adrian Leverkühn, Thomas Mann’s portagonist, composed his works. At this point the author formulates a hypothesis, the core of which is a relationship, also crucial for dodecaphony, of a magic square rules with the square from Albrecht Dürer’s “Melencolia 1.” Such relationship is held due to the use of number counterparts of a musical figure, namely haetera esmeralda. The final part of the paper contains remarks on the meanings of Roman numerals used in chapter numbers as well as considerations on the novel’s structure. Developing Jean-Yves Masson’s hypothesis, the author formulates a view about a possibility of using golden ratio in the narration of “Doktor Faustus.”
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The article discusses Dwa stolki, one of the less known political comedies by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz. The author focused on the attempt to compare content of drama with historical events at the beginning of 19th century. The aim of analyzing is to identify main characters of the comedy on the strength of allusions that the text includes. The work also discusses the composition outline of the drama which is built on the basis of the model of didactic Enlightenment comedy, but exploits the technique of the clear personal allusion. The article shows fates of manuscript, which had its first critic edition in 1970s of the 20th century.
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“Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza” (“The Polish Daily & Soldier’s Daily”), along the “Wiadomości” of London and the Parisian “Kultura”, was the most important periodical of the wartime independence emigration. Although very popular among emigrants, for years it had remained less known to readers in Poland. 2008 finally saw a monograph of this journal by Jolanta Chwastyk-Kowalczyk. Reading of her study Londyński „Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza” 1944–1989. Gazeta codzienna jako środek przekazu kulturowych [London emigration’s “Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza”, 1944–1989. A daily newspaper as a medium of cultural messages] demonstrates the culture-forming role of the journal. The Author recalls tens of names of the newspaper’s collaborators, quotes hundreds of published reviews and discussions of literary works and cultural events. In her approach, a daily newspaper becomes a record of the intellectual life of the independence emigration. My article is not a review of the book by Jolanta Chwastyk-Kowalczyk. My goal is to complement her study with a topic which has lost much of its distinctness in an enormous number of facts recalled by the author. Namely, I have paid attention to the significance of the Polish-Jewish dialogue which had been developing for many years in the pages of the London-based journal. A person to have a crucial role was Wacław Zagórski, the editor of the “Tydzień Polski” supplement. The name of Józef Lichten, who authored several dozen articles, is not mentioned in the study by the researcher of emigration press at all, the cultural activity of other Polish Jews is not sufficiently emphasized either. The book by Jolanta Chwastyk-Kowalczyk will probably remain the most comprehensive monograph of „Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza” for many years, therefore my proposal to researchers of the emigration literature is a kind of supplement, complementing the image of the journal.
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The paper is devoted to short narrative forms in Maciej Malicki’s literary creativity. The author focuses here on trans-genre shifts between a diary, a story, a novel, a poem, a letter, a fairytale etc., as well as on more general question of blurred borderlines between literary fiction and autobiographical document. How does Malicki play with conventions of autobiographical writing and how does he transgress them? What seems to be the most accurate concept for such writing practice is Serge Doubrovski’s autofiction. According to Przemysław Czapliński, what is typical of late modernism Polish prose is generic, narrative and stylistic diversity and hybridity, as well as indeterminate (non)fictional status. Of paramount importance here is total revaluation of early modernist narrative pattern and a crisis of the Grand Narrative. The article is an attempt to show how this revaluation works in Malicki’s short autofictional texts.
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The article contains an analysis of menippean aspects of Witold Gombrowicz’s “Diary,” as based mainly on the presentation of menippean satire characteristics carried out by Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo).” Other important point of reference is the writing by one of the most emminent founder of the menippeah, Lucian of Samosata’s. The article points at a number of analogies not only between Lucian and Gombrowicz’s way of thinking and seeing the reality but also between their styles and specyfic formations in fiction. The menippeah proves to be a form of literature which best responds to the Diary’s writer temperament: it allows to a serious pit against the absurd of human existence and against the paradoxes of a writer’s condition but at the same time to relieve those absurds and paradoxes with laughter.
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Fragmentul ce urmează face parte din cartea afl ată în curs de publicare la Editura Ideea Europeană, Bucureşti, intitulată Nopţile lui Emil Cioran. Textul se opreşte doar la un aspect, între altele, al relaţiei cu femeia şi feminitatea, pe care Cioran le-a avut în vedere în opera sa.
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Autorka zajmuje się analizą wybranych utworów Kurta Tucholsky’ego w aspekcie jego krytyki społecznej oraz krytyki kultury. Analiza, poprzedzona zwięzłym przedstawieniem tła historycznoliterackiego i odniesieniami do biografii Tucholsky’ego, dowodzi, że obraz Berlina wyłaniający się z dzieł omawianego autora, jak również jego jawnie wyrażana niechęć do rodzinnego miasta stanowią tak wyraz jego krytycznej postawy, jak i charakterystyczną cechę stylu pisarskiego.
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This essay reflects on the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies used by Schiller to dramatise and represent Violence. In doing so, it becomes clear that the mechanisms used by Schiller to dramatise scenes of violence and horror serve the overall aim of visualising history. With specific reference to his representations of violence in the Revolt of the Netherlands and the massacre in Magdeburg in his History of the Thirty Years War, it will be shown how Schiller sought to present the reader events of real world-historical significance. The chosen forms of violence – which align perfectly with the aspirations of Schiller the history writer – follow largely a dramaturgy of escalation. With the help of metanarrative reflections, Schiller leads the reader from one horror to another, with the overall attempt of propelling violence to the forefront of the narrative. The fact that Schiller persistently reflects and comments upon what is represented is reflected not only in his obvious recourse to metaphors but also in the theatrical dimension of his violence and, consequently, his representation of history, too. In the final analysis, therefore, all of this proves that Schiller the history writer is closely related to Schiller the dramatist.
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The title of a work of fiction is the key to its essence, but what happens when the polysemy of a certain word disappears in the process of translation to another language? The English adjective “enduring” can mean long-lasting, permanent, as well as patient, long-suffering, but it can also imply the notion of suffering as the process of coping with an issue. Those three aspects of the title of “Enduring Love”, a novel by Ian McEwan, are the subject of analysis in the current article in order to show how a simple adjective correlates with the theories of the author, encoded in the text by means of the collision between erotomania and reason, religion and Darwinism, craze and love. The Bulgarian translation of the book contains all the intertwined meanings and maintains the complicated structure of the narrative, yet the title itself remains only one-sided.
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A rhetorical model of ekphrasis distinctive of Philostratos’ “Eikones” seems to be inadequate according to the contemporary type of highly metaphorised depictions of paintings present in essays by Zbigniew Herbert, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Joanna Pollakówna, Ewa Kuryluk or Wojciech Karpiński. The traditional goal of enargeia, that assumes developing the visualising description of the represented work of art, in essayistic ekphrasis is replaced by a tendency of creating specific “energy” of metaphors stimulating reader's imagination in order to transmit the essayist’s individual experience of painting. The article contains an analysis of various types of metaphors and underlines an essential role of synaesthesias and other metaphors based on invocation of bodily sensations.
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The article presents the anthropological portrait of Brunon Schulz in the light of his correspondence with Julian Tuwim and Witkacy, and with reference to diaries of Witold Gombrowicz and Zofia Nałkowska. This issue has been taken into consideration in the context of Max Scheler’s philosophy and his anthropological theory of ens amans. In this aspect meaning of love has been identified with agape, and is also perceived to be a centre of meeting with the Other. Schulz regarded his intellectual friends, writers, as subjects worthy of love who are able to engrave the ordo amoris in the mind of the Second one. Bruno Schulz’s adoration of the Second is an anthropological process of auto transformation which has opened a man for the upper level of existence..
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