Homogotycki skandal według Michała Choromańskiego

Author(s): Piotr Sobolczyk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2014

The article introduces the category of "gaygothic" or "queer gothic" hitherto unknown in Poland and indicates its anticipations in Maria Janiońs work. The text focuses on interpreting the episodic novel »Skandal w Wesołych Bagniskach« [Scandal in Merry Swamps] by Michał Choromański, published in book form several decades after its original release in newspapers. One hypothesis suggests that this novel could inspire Witold Gombrowicz to write "The Possessed". Choromahski's novel is read as a pastiche of Gothic novels and at the same time contemporary accumulation of cultural tropes of homosexuality (allusions to works by Iwaszkiewicz, Witkiewicz, Czechowicz or Sobański).

Interpretacja kerygmatyczna w doświadczeniu historyka literatury

Author(s): Wacław Pyczek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 01/2015

The sketch shows the way, in which the author's method of kerygmatic interpretation suggested by Marian Maciejewski has defined the workshop and research practice of a scholar. The protagonist of the article is presented as a historian of literature practicing the kerygmatic exegesis of Romantic texts (lyric and narrative ones), who, while continuing his dialog with the tradition of research, suggests a new look at literary phenomena, using the paradigm of the apostolic (evangelical) kerygma. Such an approach to literature exhibits the human history and emphasizes the complex of existential experiences of the persons speaking (the lyrical subject, the narrator) or of the protagonists; at the same time it makes it possible to describe more fully the deep structure of the work. The scholar's concern is locating the phenomena of literature against the reality of the Word proclaimed by the Gospel. Marian Maciejewski's practice of research is presented here as a form of a certain testimony of his faithfulness to the Word.

O sobie, innym i Rudolfie, czyli Marian Pankowski i jego ulubiona figura biograficzna

Author(s): Przemysław Górecki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2016

The article is an attempt to analyse the literary output of Marian Pankowski, Polish writer, in terms of the phenomenon of otherness as a biographical figure and its exemplifications. The research material consists of Marian Pankowski’s works mainly from the late period of his literary activity – the novels Rudolf, Putto and the drama Ksiądz Helena. The main course of reflexion concentrates on gender aspects of the literary characters’ construction. It is divided into some minor categories concerning for example the ways of showing the Other (by presenting, familiarizing, justifying) and analyzing areas bound with the essence of sensing own alienation. The analysis of literature was carried out using some cultural, anthropological and esthetic contexts and by the use of feminist, gender or postsecular theory.

Twórczość literacka Władysława Bogusławskiego – „kwestia podrzędna”?

Author(s): Aneta Mazur / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

The paper describes the literary creativity of Władysław Bogusławski (1838–1909), an distinguished theatre critic (theorist) and a deserving literary critic. Bogusławski was the author of prose pieces produced mainly in 1880s. The most interesting of them—six tales and short stories as well as one dramatic sketch—represent female (feminist) discourse, showing sex relations penetratingly and nonstereotypically: in a psychological-customary, social, anthropological, history-cultural and philosophical context, as well as from the ambivalent pro- and antiemancipatory stance. Equally interesting and valuable are two autobiographical reminiscences referring to the writer’s stay in exile in Siberia. Finally, there are two minor tales—parables with a philosophical and ethical message. Bogusławski’s thematically and formally diversified prose is characterised by original compositional solutions and aesthetic erudition (e.g. references to music and painting).

„Kopciuszek” Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego – najbardziej warszawska powieść przed „Lalką”

Author(s): Barbara Bobrowska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

The article refers to Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s “Kopciuszek” (“Cinderella”, 1862), pre-textually based on a fairy tale thread, though realising the pattern of the realist novel about a big city. Monographism, physiologism and thrilling motives link it to the achievements of such Western writers as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac or Charles Dickens, but in its minute reproduction of the 19th c. Warsaw topography and space anthropology the novel portends Bolesław Prus’ “The Doll.” In his “Cinderella,” written in the blink of the Polish January Insurrection, Kraszewski portraits Warsaw bustling with life and easily entering into modernity, while Prus in his novel shows Warsaw constrained by the Russian occupier’s police close surveillance, as if “hypnotised,” easily losing it good pace of the civilizational changes that that have already started. Even if “Cinderella” can by no means match the mastery of “The Doll,” it may be viewed as a contribution to its origin and as an interesting stage in the development of 19th c. Polish novel.

Wizerunek kobiety w amerykańskiej korespondencji Henryka Sienkiewicza

Author(s): Aleksandra Chomiuk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

The article presents Sienkiewicz’s images of women from his “Listy z podróży do Ameryki” (“Letters from a Trip to America”). It researches Litwos’ statements referring to real and postulated woman behaviours, the social roles attributed to women, and the features which constitute femininity as a social-cultural category. The discourses concerning the differences between sexes and emancipation problems contemporary to Sienkiewicz make a broader context of the presented journalistic observations.

Pod ciężarem oświecenia

Author(s): Piotr Misztela / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

The subject of the article are references to the 18th century in Stanisław Brzozowski’s novel “Sam wśród ludzi” (“Alone among People”). 18th century exponents in the novel are first and foremost the figures of Marcin Ogieński and priest Klemens Rotuła who in various ways struggle, in the face of the social-political changes that took place at the onset of the Age of Reason, with the fall of their ideals. The aim of the argument is a presentation of the references’ functionalities as well as placing them against the background of Brzozowski’s general creative and world view assumptions. In Brzozowski’s reflection, returns to the 18th century provide with opportunities to question for the roots of modernity and for the sources of the (negative) stances contemporary to him. The returns also co-create, which the author of the paper tries to prove, the cultural diagnoses and projects put forward by Brzozowski, as well as support the ethical conceptions.

Kim jest „rudobrody rzeźbiarz”?

Author(s): Aleksandra Sikorska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

The article touches the problem of Venetian painting in such Cyprian Norwid’s pieces as “Menego”, “Salon Paryski 1881” (“Paris Salon 1881”) and the short story “Ad leones!.” When it comes to the origin of the second piece, he author of the paper finds the opinions by Theophile Gautier particularly valuable, especially those of them which refer to the issue of Venetian painting and the 19th c. continuators of the tradition. Philippe Beauassant’s book ”Passages, de la Renaissance au Baroque” (”Passages. From the Renaissance to Baroque”), the reading of which accompanied the author while producing the paper, allows to look at the consensus recorded in research tradition that the greyhound bitch accompanying the red-bearded sculptor best attests the virtues of the main character of “Ad leones!.” An effect of such readings is, according to the author of the paper, the opinion expressed by Dariusz Pniewski that “the sculptor was a few times named red-bearded and, which is equally important and even most important, he is accompanied by a dog, a greyhound.” It is for that reason that the researcher’s observations about Norwid’s attitude to Venetian colorism, though valuable, prove insufficient. The author of the paper attempts to reverse the tendency found in research in “Ad leones!,” trying to reach for the possible genesis of red-bearded sculptor’s creation. Employing this approach, the context of Venetian painting in the short story is extended by a possible iconographic inspiration as well as by a problem of mannerism (in its historical perspective) seen as a trend in the decline of the Renaissance, anticipating, in Norwid’s view, the tendencies in the art of his days. “Ad leones!,” written nearly at the end of the poet’s creativity, gains a double, symbolic frame of reference: Norwid’s reflection on the status of the artist, his predispositions and moral stance become also a view which embraces not only the 19th c., but also the end of the Renaissance.

Artykuł Theodora Westrina o oblężeniu Jasnej Góry przez wojska Karola X Gustawa w 1655 roku, opublikowany w Szwecji w 1904 roku: Filip Mazurkiewicz, wstęp

Author(s): Theodor Westrin / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

Theodor Westrin’s study was published in 1904 and is presumably an answer to Henryk Sienkiewicz’s growing international fame crowned by the Nobel Prize the writer was awarded with in 1905. Westrin gives a survey of Swedish historical sources referring to the siege of Jasna Góra Monastery, and then compares them with the Polish accounts on the subject, primarily with Abbot Augustyn Kordecki’s “Nowa Gigantomachia” (“New Gigantomachia”). Thus the reader finds here many protagonists well known from Sienkiewicz’s “Potop” (“Deluge”); apart from Kordecki, also General Buchard Müller, Count Jan Weyhard Wrzeszczowicz, Marshall Arvid Wittenberg, and ultimately the kings—the Polish and the Swedish. One of the main myths of Polish history debugs here, while many elements of the accounts of the siege to which we got accustomed or which we regard as trustworthy became half- or untrue.

Julian Gaudenty Kaliszewski w świetle nowych źródeł

Author(s): Dorota Samborska-Kukuć / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

The article is a biographical-genealogical complement to life and activity of Julian Gaudenty Kaliszewski, a Warsaw publicist, author of controversial paraliterary texts, who was active in the years 1868–1888. The regained certificates, especially these of the writer’s birth and death, of his parents’ wedding and their deaths, of his siblings’ deaths, dwelling places, as well as minor corrections of Dobrosława Świerczyńska’s key publications allow to complete the blanks in the writer’s biography and to introduce a few new conclusions.

Dotknąć światła… O dotyku w pierwszym tomie poetyckim Zbigniewa Herberta

Author(s): Anna HARATYK / Language(s): Polish Issue: 36/2018

The purpose of this research is to show the transition from sense of sight to the sense of touch, which happens in the first Zbigniew Herbert’s poetic volume titled String of light, to show the complexity of their connection, the intensity of the haptic experience and it’s poetical functions. By using the archeology of terms (Greek, Hebrew, Latin) – which shows connections between studied issues and the texts which underlie the European culture – outlining the philosophical context and the modern cultural anthropology’s view, the multidimensionality of Herbert’s work is outlined and his innovative effort to find the basis for existence in reality marked by disintegration of human and experience is shown.

Postsekularna katabaza. Książeczka Olgi Tokarczuk

Author(s): Piotr Bogalecki / Language(s): English Issue: 03/EN/2019

The subject of this article is Olga Tokarczuk’s libretto to the opera Ahat-ilī. Siostra bogów (Ahat-ilī – Sister of Gods) by Aleksander Nowak, which premiered on 16 September 2018. Although the idea for the libretto was based on the novel Anna In w grobowcach świata (Anna In in the Tombs of the World), published in 2006 as part of the Canongate Myth Series, its structure and tone diverge from its original. The author of the article conducts a comparative analysis of the aforementioned texts and specifies the direction of the changes introduced by the writer. He concludes that the differentiating repetition of the mythical tale about a Sumerian goddess Inanna can be simultaneously viewed as a mirror in which the author of Flights took a look at herself years later, and as a lens focalizing key threads of her writing, including her evolving attitude towards metaphysics and spirituality.

Nomadyzm Olgi Tokarczuk

Author(s): Wojciech Józef Burszta / Language(s): English Issue: 03/EN/2019

This article attempts to interpret the work of Olga Tokarczuk via the lens of nomadism, which is one of the defining features of contemporary times. Tokarczuk’s prose is an example of a distinctive transition from the chora to the topos in the sense of an inability to anchor the modern subject in any form of lasting roots. The nomadic stories of Tokarczuk are both a diagnosis of human homelessness as well an expression of helplessness; what can be done with this fluid, unmoored human condition and where to find any form of lasting identification with another person and a fixed place?

Polskie jądra ciemności. Postkolonialne wymiary historii i kultury

Author(s): Waldemar Kuligowski / Language(s): English Issue: 03/EN/2019

This article’s attempt to apply postcolonial theses as a tool for rethinking Polish culture and history requires confrontation with the following engrained opinions: (1) Poland was not an imperialistic country, and having had no colonies absolves it from accounting for a shameful past, and (2) the non-colonial Poland is grouped with other colonized countries and nations (from the late 18th century until the year 1989). The analysis refers to the “structure of feeling” generated by the imperialistic Poland in the former borderlands as well as in relation to the peasant and Ukrainian populations after the Second World War. The ruling government’s treatment of natural forests as an economic resource that can be managed freely by the authorities is another strain of Polish cryptocolonialism.

Pisanie Herberta. O (i wokół) nowej biografii autorstwa Andrzeja Franaszka

Author(s): Mateusz Antoniuk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2019

Antoniuk discusses Andrzej Franaszek’s biography of Zbigniew Herbert (Herbert; vol. 1: Niepokój [Unrest], vol. II: Pan Cogito [Mr. Cogito], Cracow 2018). The article opens with a discussion of Franaszek’s strategies as a biographer, then turns to the question of the main aspect of the portrait that emerges from his book, and concludes with detailed comments from the perspective of a Herbert scholar familiar with his archive. The article also includes a marginal discussion on biographical writing.

Odkrywanie Iwaszkiewicza

Author(s): Radosław Romaniuk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2019

Romaniuk discusses how Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s oeuvre came to be an autobiographical narrative. Individual elements – literary works and personal documents – exist in a hierarchical system, an organic whole in which individual elements appear most meaningful when they are viewed side by side. For Romaniuk, Iwaszkiewicz’s diaries and letters represent an attempt to bridge the gap between his literary works and aspects of his lived experience for which he never found an appropriate artistic form of expression. The biographer’s task is to integrate the writer’s “life and work”. A major challenge is the fact that Iwaszkiewicz insists on the need to portray the unwritten sphere of his inner life, hidden underneath a layer of facts and recorded emotions – the sphere that a reader can only guess or sense vaguely.

Pożegnanie z Bronisławą Waligórską. Praktyki biograficzne

Author(s): Monika Rudaś-Grodzka / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2019

Bronisława Waligórska was a teacher born in the 1840s and arrested for terrorist activities in 1886. Her letters to her sister, written from the Warsaw Citadel until Waligórska’s suicide in January 1887, were edited by Monika Rudaś-Grodzka and published in 2018. In this article Rudaś-Grodzka discusses the benefits and drawbacks of the method of life writing she applied in her editorial work – a method based on personal documents such as memoirs, letters and journals.

Jak wydać twórczość Tomasza Nargielewicza? Stanowisko Pracowni Literatury Średniowiecza IBL PAN w sprawie edycji krytycznej kodeksu Ossolineum Pawlik. 3

Author(s): Andrzej Dąbrówka,Dorota Gacka,Mariusz Kazańczuk / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2019

On 20 November 2017 the Working group for Critical Editions of Early Texts (Zespół Edytorstwa Krytycznego Tekstów Dawnych) held a meeting where Mariusz Kazańczuk and Dorota Gacka presented the concept of their critical edition of Tomasz Nargielewicz’s oeuvre (in progress). Their idea was to publish Nargielewicz’s longer fictional works only, leaving out the shorter ones that have already been edited by Teresa Kruszewska- Michałowska. Representatives of the Editorial Committee of the Library of Old-Polish Writers (Komitet Redakcyjny Biblioteki Pisarzy Staropolskich) questioned this concept, arguing that the edition ought to be an exact reflection of the manuscript’s content and arrangement. The Section and its Head gave a detailed reply in support of their proposal in their “Statement” (“Stanowisko Pracowni”), presented afterwards at the Codicology Seminar along with a polemic by Łukasz Cybulski, to which Andrzej Dąbrówka responds in his article “Ars Sine Scientia Nihil Est” – both in the present issue.

Alojzego Felińskiego stosunek do pieniędzy i dóbr materialnych

Author(s): Magdalena Patro-Kucab / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2019

The research material of this study consists of selected fragments of epistolography of Alojzy Feliński, a poet who created at the turn of the 18th and 19th century. The analysis is devoted to selected letters which the poet wrote to Michał Wyszkowski, Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, Jan and Waleria Tarnowski and Franciszek Rudzki. The aim of the article is to draw attention to the value of material goods in Feliński’s life. A poetic type of argumentation was observed in the study, which – often indirectly – revealed the poet’s attitude towards money. Taking into account the historical and biographical context, as well as the persuasiveness of the words of the Volyn poet, the study aims to explain Feliński’s common sense thinking about both money and material goods.

Olga Tokarczuk Nobel-díja

Author(s): György Gömöri / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 11/2019