Tadeusz Peiper’s bodies

This article is an attempt to compare two different visions of human body in Tadeusz Peiper’s poetry and autobiographical prose. First is connected with the movement of Avant-garde art of the 1920s, the second reflects the late phase of Peiper’s life in the 1950s, strongly influenced by psychosis 

Rescue or about poetry despite trauma. Affection, imagination and community in Czeslaw Milosz’s works in the 40s.

In the sketch, I try to highlight the uniqueness of thinking about creative passion and poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, especially the practical implementation of his worldview in the volume of Rescue. On the one hand I attempt to capture the development of Milosz’s reflection and artistic creation from late 30s to early 50s, by showing how he has struggled with two tendencies: transparency stemming from his left-wing youth and designed to enable communication with the community of ordinary people and maintenance of vivid imagination, in which manifests the indefinite affect of artisitic creation, the vital force. The second trend of his work in a particular way becomes present in Rescue, so that the poet has already at the time of war created a formula for going through trauma in order to allow the return to life, to sensory and diverse reality, as well as ethical opening to another human being.

 

Collage as an Act of Profanation? On the Works of Ewa Kuryluk

The article is an attempt to analyse both artwork and prose of Ewa Kuryluk, focusing on the question of the representation of the Holocaust and its boundaries. This analysis refers to “the generation of postmemory” which is struggling to work through a heritage of the Holocaust. The author uses the notion of collage concerning Kuryluk’s works to describe not only a technique of an art and literary production, but also an aesthetic process of reconstruction a family biography and seeking own identity as a member of traumatic experience.

 

From the “Root Children” to “Soil Folks”. The Case of Sibylle von Olfers’ Picturebooks Reception in Poland

The case of direct relation between Maria Konopnicka’s Na jagody! and Elsa Beskow’s Puttes äventyr i blåbärsskogen is well known and widely discussed in literature. Unfortunately, none of the researchers did not pay attention to the fact that in the case of picturebooks, separating the text from the images change the sense and reception of the work. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, printers and publishers of children’s literature often modified the foreign texts without giving the name of the author and original title of the book. According to this issue I analysed the relation between Sibylle von Olfers’ Etwas von den Wurzelkindern and Julian Ejsmond’s Baśń o ziemnych ludkach. I focused on the German work. Shorter and simpler text, turned out to be extremely rich and giving great scope for interpretation. In this article I proved that books of Sibylle von Olfers were integrally designed, and that meaning is generated simultaneously from written word, visual images and overall design. Not only words and images, but also cover and endpapers are significant. That is why separating images from words and using them with different text should never have happened.

 

Ironical spirit of versification

The article is an overview of Paul Bukowiec’s book titled Metronome. About the individuality of “too rhythmic” poetry (Jagiellonian University, Cracow 2015), which on the one hand is the literary theoretical versological manifesto, and on the other hand – the original proposal how to read three texts: Comments on death inevitable and common to all expressed in poems by Jozef Baka (1766), Ball in Opera by Julian Tuwim (1946) and Nothing twice by Wislawa Szymborska (1957). An original concept to transfer into the field of versification the category of individuality poetry by Derek Attridge, becomes here a contribution to the critical reflection on the history and condition of contemporary Polish theory of verse, which is entering the culturally oriented post-structural stage, as well as on the potential poetological practice centred around interpretation of the specific poetical cases. 

New biography of Brzozowski

The article is a review of Stanislaw Brzozowski biography written by Andrzej Mencwel. The reviewer emphasizes the connection with the author’s earlier works on Brzozowski, indicates the author’s increased interest in the work of the author of Legends of Young Poland. Essayistic and interdisciplinary character of Mencwell’s biography explains well the uniqueness of Brzozowski in the twentieth-century Polish and European culture.

 

There are no/mad women in this attic

The basis of the contemplations contained in the article is a book by Monica Świerkosz titled In the space of tradition. Prose of Izabela Filipiak and Olga Tokarczuk in disputes about literature, canon and feminism. The author of the sketch outlines the threads on the feminist discourse about the past, which remain the key to the book’s analyses and reconstructs the importance of nomadic methodological project, which by criticising the concept of feminine continuum enables the expansion of languages to interpret “text genealogy” of contemporary Polish female writers.
 

Traveller of the World in La Sapienza                                                                 

A new  volume of studies on Czesław Miłosz and his oeuvre, edited by Tomasz Bilczewski, Luigi Marinelli and Monika Woźniak,contains a collection of articles written by worldwide renown scholars and translators of Miłosz’s writings. The collection may be considered as a multivocal revision of the contemporary status of the image of the poet’s world. What appears to be the underlying principle of these various approaches to Milosz, is the general focus on his panoramic view of different continents and time perspectives. It is the tension between ‘home’ and ‘homelesness’, the state of being always ‘here’ and (at the same time) ‘there’, that makes the passage from a modern to a postmodern condition of humanity, the passage reflected upon in many of the articles collected in this international volume.