Krukowaty czy sikora?
Review of: Krukowaty czy sikora? Lennart Nilsson tłum. Adam Sterno Oriolus Förlag, Uppsala 2014 190 ss.
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Review of: Krukowaty czy sikora? Lennart Nilsson tłum. Adam Sterno Oriolus Förlag, Uppsala 2014 190 ss.
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Stanjislav Ignaci Vitkjevič, u detinjstvu Staš, a od umetničkog debija Vitkaci, rođen je 1885. godine, i sa očeve i sa majčine strane plemićkog porekla, osiromašenog posle učešća u Ustanku 1863. protiv carske Rusije. Bez obzira na to 1914. on napušta svog prijatelja Bronjislava Malinovskog s kojim je krenuo u etnografsko-antropološka istraživanja na Novu Gvineju, Cejlon i Australiju, u svojstvu fotografa i vraća se u Evropu, da bi se uključio u rat. Međutim, ne bori se na strani Austrijanaca, pod čijom je okupacijom Zakopane u kome živi od 1890, već se bori na strani Rusa.
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This article argues for the need of preparing a new, complete edition of Jan Lechoń’s (1899–1956) journal. The author describes the importance that keeping a diary had for the poet, and traces Lechoń’s own efforts to get this work published. Moreover, previous editions of the work – the exile version from 1967–1973 (ed. Mieczysław Grydzewski and Juliusz Sakowski) and the domestic one from 1992–1993 (ed. Roman Loth) – are reconsidered here, revealing the necessity of preparing a new edition. The final part of the article contains some practical solutions which might be taken into account while preparing a new edition of the journal (base text, critical apparatus, digital version).
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Marcin Wicha, Stvari koje nisam izbacio .Marcin Wicha, Rzeczy, których nie wyrzuciłem, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Karakter 2017. Književna nagrada „Nike” za najbolju knjigu godine (2018). Nagrada nedeljnika „Polityka” (Pasoš „Polityke”, 2017). Reviewed by Katarzyna Taczyńska.
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Essay writing by Bolesław Leśmian, a graduate of law, draws attention not only to the presence of the philosophical or sociological context but also the legal one while his poetry seems to be completely detached from legal practice. The issue of legal protection of values represented by life is depicted in the interpretation of two dissimilar poetic works, namely the ballad Asoka from the volume Łąka (The Meadow) and the poem starting with the words “Przez śnieżycę, co wyjąc powiększa przestworza” from Dziejba leśna (Forest Happenings). Aśoka, a monarch and lawmaker in ancient India, guaranteed it in his addresses. It paths the way to the spiritual for the hero of many legends. In the 20th century the value of human life is guarded by “a representative of law”, uniformed police officer whose very presence in the street prevents robbery. In both cases life is treated by Leśmian as the highest value motivated metaphysically, which opens the way for further reflections concerning the grandeur of law as understood by the poet as well as to the question whether the issue of connections between literature and law, already known from the research into the literary output of Franz Kafka, may help understand Bolesław Leśmian’s outlook on life.
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The paper, being a postscript to the book "Miejsca Leśmiana. Topika recepcji krytycznoliterackiej" (Leśmian’s places. The topos of critical reception) (2011), outlines the history of literary criticism reception of Bolesław Leśmian’s output from the first years of the 21st century to the jubilee year 2017. Not only did the accelerated reception visible already in the early 1990s continue to gain momentum but it even got stronger in the analyzed period. Critics are bolder and bolder in speaking of Leśmian as a precursor of the 20th century modernism and postmodernism; “(post) modernizations” of Leśmian are accompanied, in turn, by changes on the level of language (even though some of them are rather superficial). Despite the discontinuity highlighted by critics, this “return to Leśmian”, which has lasted for over two decades, is to a large extent a come-back to approaches and threads of earlier reception. There are, however, significant shifts, e.g. in the uses of the topos of Leśmian’s Jewish/Polish identity. Totally new phenomena, in contrast, include politicization of the discourse about the poet.
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The interpretations included in the paper refer to the motif of the plait which appeared in different genre forms of Bolesław Leśmian’s writing. Part one offers an introduction to its most important symbolic meanings: extraordinary value which corresponds to verse, poetic art and, at the same time, transgression and fusion of the appearance with the truth. These threads are developed in the following sub-chapter which justifies the assumption that through depicting the plait Leśmian ironically shows the paradoxality of existence as a tangle of fantasy and reality. The poet’s thought is explained in this part by the concept of Jacques Derrida’s pharmakon. The subsequent part of the article presents Leśmian’s transgressive creatures: women with plaits and plaits alone illustrating that poetry symbolized by them represents a value which is a transformation, “song with no words”, violation of boundaries and fusion of contradictions. Juxtaposing these motifs with gnostic ideas continued in the following isolated fragment overlaps with showing connections between Leśmian’s works with the formula of romantic irony, particularly as understood by Friedrich Schlegel. The parabasis, auto-ironic traces and the concept of “wordless melody” are analyzed in final interpretations which lead to the conclusion that the plait in Leśmian’s works is a figure of the unthinkable mystery of existence, and at the same time it symbolizes poetry, irony and fantasy.
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The article explores multi-dimensional sensitivity to the void as a major feature of Bolesław Leśmian’s poetry. The author distinguishes those stylistic devices which extract, on the level of language, the the feeling of non-fullness, absence, or nonexistence in Leśmian’s poems. Apophatic language translates itself into the issue of nonexistence seen as meaningful lack. The article focuses not so much on the category of the negation of existence as on independent, fixed, affective type of experience. The author inquires what happens with the poetic voice confronted with the Other in a situation experiencing pain resulting from lack. Empathetic co-feeling of “I” with the other turns out to be the most important state. The moment someone else’s pain is discovered, feelings change into the affective state which cannot be either realized or described. The I-Other-void confrontation brings about an affect. The empathetic “I” meets the Other who experiences various kinds of absence. The Other’s feelings become recognized and even, to some extent, defined by the person who speaks in the text but the affect happens afterwards. The emphatic confrontation and co-feeling destruct the coherent voice and the text itself for it causes that kind of unspeakable experience that cannot be realized, expressed or represented. This is an experience not-to-be-named.
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The essay "Impossible nature? Ecopoetic traces in Leśmian’s verdure" is both a proposal and an attempt to interpret the literary output of the author of Dziejba leśna (Forest Happenings) from the ecopoetic perspective. Lyrical ways of presenting nature are subject to interpretation, accounting for their metonymic character (verdure) and entanglement in the process of shaping the poetic language. The natural universe outlined by Leśmian is connected with the approval of diversity, complexity and elusiveness of nature in the process of cognition. At the same time nature becomes endowed with cognitive potential when combined with the substance of words. Leśmian’s poems seem to form not so much a coherent ecopoetic project as manifest certain ecopoetic intuition.
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The essay presents an interpretation of Bolesław Leśmian’s poem entitled "Topielec" (The Drowned), which has already been the subject of interest of many different scholars. The author of the essay draws attention to the difference in editing which appeared in the second edition of the volume "Łąka" (The Meadow) from 1937. The first edition of the book from 1920 contains the word “bezświat” (unworld) in the phrase “bezświat zarośli” (unworld of thicket) and this version was commonly adopted in the subsequent editions and analyses of Leśmian’s poetry. The author of the essay argues that is is rather the version of the second edition, namely “bezświt” (non-dusk) in “bezświt zarośli” (non-dusk of thicket), that is in accord with the poetics of Leśmian’s verse and the idea of the work. In the interpretation in accordance with the 1937 edition "Topielec" is a poem about drowning in death and gradual losing of the soul
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The paper represents an attempt at a multi-aspect analysis and interpretation of Leśmian’s poem entitled "Niedziela" (Sunday) through putting it firstly in the context of the cycle "W chmur odbiciu" (In the reflection of clouds) in which it was placed, and then through extracting some immanent meaning contained in the poem. Particular attention was paid to the ballads semantics, the symbolism of Sunday (spelt with a capital letter), Biblical intertextual references and Schopenhauer’s inspirations. Careful analysis of these issues leads to conclusions concerning tasks and obligations of poetry in the world subdued to suffering and death.
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Transgression engages psychosomatically: the corporeal experience of pain and pleasure provoked by self-preservation constraints paves the way for experiences detached from the senses and reason. Violation of barriers violates the man; beyond that lays the impossible, which in the well-known Leśmian’s ballad "Piła" is transposed as disintegration and dispersion of the body experiencing cruel delight. The article is an attempt at refreshed reading of this ballad; it suggests taking into account a sadistic context which is considered atypical of research into Leśmian. In this poem the inspiration of folk beliefs permeates with the modernist experience of the revolution. The similarity of carnal intercourse to a scene of spectacular torture makes it possible to treat this ballad as an important voice in the issue of distinction between sexuality aimed at progeny, and eroticism leading to barren and unuseful pleasure. The paper focuses on the characteristics of libertine features of Leśmian’s poetics, the indication of potential sources of the woman-saw image, the importance of exclamations of ballad lovers, the issue of rhythm and the symbolism of fragmented body.
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Bolesław Leśmian’s poem *** [Z dłońmi tak splecionymi, jakbyś klęcząc, spała…] (With your hands clasped as if you slept kneeling) is analyzed with regard to the categories of carnality and representation, paying attention to the issue of rhythm. The author examines “significance”, traces the occurrence of transversal reflections and researches the logical and rhetorical structure which reveals its dynamic character and spatiality in the form of DNA chain links. The interpretation of the phonological layer of the text brings to mind somatic experiencing of reading the lyric poem, and consequently the way in which Leśmian’s the subject establishes contact with the reader.
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In her early short story entitled "Ultimus" Konopnicka accomplished the concept of Falkentheorie by Paul Heyse in an original way, using the motif of a crane as the thematic and composition keystone. Inspired to a large extent by Orzeszkowa’s "Romanowa", Konopnicka writes about moral depravation of a young nobleman, using parallelism: man-animal in two orders – naturalistic and symbolic. The empathic reception of the text diverging from previous interpretations allows to place "Ultimus" among texts which stand up for miserables personas.
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The reviewed book by Anna Filipowicz entitled "(Prze)zwierzęcenia. Poetyckie drogi do postantropocentryzmu" is one of the key dissertations analyzing human and animal relations as exemplified by Polish poetry of the 20th and 21st century. The author is innovative in her interpretation of poems by poets considered to be canonical (Anna Świrszczyńska, Tadeusz Różewicz, Marcin Świetlicki, Ryszard Krynicki, Tomasz Różycki, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz and Julian Tuwim), using her knowledge of ethology and natural science. The greatest strength of the dissertation, in the opinion of the reviewer, is the micrological analysis of individual works, enhancing the importance of the detail, due to which the reader receives a compendium of major problems connected with animal emancipation in two time planes (during the Warsaw Uprising and in contemporary times). Filipowicz calls for rejecting stereotypes which so far have enhanced species chauvinism and hierarchical structure in accidental encounters (the case of animals living in zoos and non-urbanized areas) as well as developing interspecies sensitivity. Its manifestations could include, for instance, concern about noticing individual biographies of animals during armed conflicts or preventing the destruction of biotopes. Filipowicz’s work is not only an example of skillful application of methodology bordering on environmental humanities, animal studies and affective studies, but also an important voice in the debate on constructing environmental order and the place/role of animals in human life.
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Auto/bio/geo/graphics forms a creative and original interpretive lens of the author of the book, which looks at individual volumes, poems and texts about art by Julia Hartwig. Space assigned to the eponymous center, province and backstreets becomes the compositional frame, allowing for a smooth narration. These spatial references function as the compositional key of the book divided into three segments: "France - a nostalgic center, America - the everyday life province" and "Poland – backstreets of history and memory", in which, in specific examples of works, each time a space and its transformations are accounted for.
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In his book "Poeta w labiryncie historii. Studia o pisarskich rolach Jerzego Ficowskiego" (Poet in the labyrinth of history. Studies on writer’s roles of Jerzy Ficowski) Jerzy Kandziora strives to provide a holistic outlook on the literary output of the author of Ptak poza ptakiem (A bird beyond birds). The main interpretation categories proposed by the scholar include time, labyrinth and history. They allowed the author to create a cross-section book ranging from describing Ficowski’s pre-poetic life, through his literary and artistic fascinations with Schulz, Wojtkiewicz, Tuwim and the everyday world, to the experience of borderland, both literal and poetic. Using this essayistic and also in some fragments synthetic form of description, Kandziora marks a new trend in interpreting the poet’s output and draws attention particularly to the impact of the social imaginary for the functioning of the poet in contemporary literary studies.
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The article discusses the situation of a writer who being a member of society is going through a drama in which he must choose between his homeland and his conscience. The article reviews the situation as envisaged by Leonidas Donskis and presents a model. The main focus is on the fourth form of a writer’s relationship with society, i.e., the necessity to choose. A writer feels alienated from society. A dysfunctional relationship is formed which gives rise to the structure of the concept of alienation. Finally, the discussion turns to a few examples of alienation from society and homeland in the biographies of Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz.
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The article deals with the reception of a prominent Baroque Polish writer, Jesuit Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski, introduced by Bohuslav Balbín in the Czech literature (in the Latin work Versimilia humaniorum disciplinarum, 1666; Czech translation 2006: Nástin humanitních disciplín, i.e “Outline of Humanities”), he also follows the reception of Sarbiewski's personality and works, especially in the Czech history of Polish literature and dictionaries of Polish writers. Furthermore, he focuses on the reception of Sarbiewski in Slovakia, especially in the work of the Slovak revivalist writer, priest Timoteu Cochius (pen name Ctiboh Zoch). In the end, he recalls the critic reflections of the Czech emigrant Slavist Antonín Měšťan in a review of the proceedings of the Warsaw Conference on Sarbiewski (1995). The author states that one can agree Měšťan's view that the Polish Proceedings on the Work of Sarbiewski could become a model for similar studies of Slavonic literatures of the Baroque period, especially in Bohemia, where emotionally burdened understanding on the one side of Hussite Objective scientific research on both opposing epochs has made it difficult for different poles for a long time.
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