Troubles with the Polishness. Boy and Mickiewicz

Tadeusz Boy Żeleński read Mickiewicz as if it were a complex depiction of Polish national soul’s meanders. Love for the motherland, patriotism and prophet’s mythology on the one hand, and concealment of facts, destroying historical documents and ordinary lies on the other. Boy’s criticism, developed on the basis of French rationalism, cuts this mishmash open, like a scalpel revealing areas affected with illness that need to be cured by enlightened reason. It would appear that these nearly a century old, perverse, and thus revelatory conclusions have become almost obsolete. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Poland they will never cease to be valid...      

 

Tadeusz Boy-Zeleński aux yeux d’Antoni Słonimski (Chroniques hebdomadaires 1927-1939)

Ma communication se situe dans le prolongement de ce que Czesław Miłosz a défini comme une excursion, un déplacement a posteriori dans la Pologne de l’entre-deux-guerres »  Elle se justifie par le souhait de stimuler notre imagination sur la base de documents écrits de l’époque. Les Chroniques hebdomadaires d’Antoni Słonimski font bien partie de ces documents susceptibles d’éveiller à l’heure actuelle notre plus grand intérêt. Qu’est-ce qui m’a fait rapprocher ces deux personnalités de l’entre-deux-guerres : Tadeusz Boy-Zeleński  et Antoni  Słonimski ?  Ce qui réunit profondément ces deux écrivains polémistes, Boy et Słonimski, c’est l’humour, l’esprit brillant et le ton satirique. Mais l’enjeu principal qui reste au centre de leurs combats est le libéralisme éclairé et anticlérical, le progressisme social, le courage réformiste, la sensibilité sociale et le rejet du pathos national, de la fausse solennité associée à la pompe.
Dès le début Boy-Zelenski y apparaît aux yeux du polémiste comme un puissant rénovateur de la société. Quel regard peut-on porter, au final, sur l’action de ces deux défenseurs de la société démocratique moderne pris dans le tourbillon des événements provoqués par la montée généralisée des nationalismes en marche? Quelle place leur écriture occupe-telle dans le panthéon de la littérature polonaise ? Voici quelques questions auxquelles j’ai voulu répondre dans mon article.

 

Boy-Żeleński and Cat-Maciewicz

Cat Mackiewicz was conservative journalist and supporter monarchist idea in interwar time Poland; Boy Żeleński – an advocate of feminism and anti-clerical writer. Politically, their positions were diametrically opposed, but Cat Mackiewicz estimated Boy as the greatest writer of the interwar period. The article is an attempt to identify common points in their cultural idea. Both, Cat as journalist and Boy as translator and writer dealt with the cultural transfer; they were aware that the culture of Poland, because  of her periferic position, must constantly expand her ties with Europe and at the same time they thought as important maintaining the specific features of Polish style.
 

A debate on cultural (im)maturity (that didn’t take place): Karol Irzykowski and Tadeusz Boy-żeleński

The article proposes an analysis of Karol Irzykowski’s Benjaminek (Benjamin, 1932), a stud and an attack on Tadeusz Boy-żeleński’s activity and writings as well as the reaction of the criticized author. The former’s work reveals to be rather an extensive defence of Irzykowski’s critical writings, and the latter’s answer – a pamphlet. Finally, their dialogue that didn’t take place is situated in the context of Polish (and Central-European) cultural immaturity.
 

Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński copyright law suit against ‘Czas’

The article is devoted to Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński’s special event in his writer’s career: a lawsuit, which was brought in 1927, against one of the most popular and well-known newspaper in Krakow (“Czas”) represented by its editor in chief, Antoni Beaupré. Boy-Żeleński, a great journalist, publicist and translator, published in a different newspapers a few feuilletons about his visit in Paris and then decided to reprint it in “Czas”. He was really astonished and afflicted with the fact that his work was reprinted in a different way, by cutting out some words and phrases. That was the reason why he decided to sue “Czas” for personal damages. It was probably the first copywright lawsuit in independent Poland after the I World War, which was important in the further history of changes in copyright law. The author of the article shows the main areas of the lawsuit and some circumstances which affected the public opinion in Poland at that time, as well as specific features of Żeleński’s personality and his style of writing.
 

The above-mentioned poets are considered to be great innovators in the histories of their respective literary traditions. There are numerous volumes of critical commentaries on their works and their place within modernism. The aim of this paper is not to bring to the fore similarities of the changeable fortunes of their lives and oeuvres. It has already been noted in scholarly investigations that their poetry emerged on the literary map after many years of neglect and served as a sign of aesthetic avant-gardism. My main objective will be to examine how Norwid’s interest in the realm of seemingly banal objects can be contextualized within a broader horizon opened by such poets as Hopkins and Dickinson, who discovered surprisingly fresh, and previously inconceivable, ways of representing their encounter with reality.
 

Initialement étroites entre juin 1898 et l’hiver 1899–1900, à Cracovie, les relations de Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński et Stanisław Przybyszewski se sont ensuite distendues et pratiquement rompues du fait de l’éloignement géographique et de l’évolution de la personnalité de Boy. En s’appuyant sur les références de chaque écrivain à son ancien compagnon de bohême, cette communication expose les regards croisés des deux écrivains et les jugements de chacun sur l’autre, avant de confronter leurs tempéraments, leurs conceptions littéraires et leurs visions du monde.
 

Transculturality: from the idea of Wolfgang Welsch to transcultural literary history

The article focuses on the problem of transculturality and the manner in which it can be adapted as a method of literary analysis. The article presents Wolfgang Welsch’s original idea of transculturality, the shifting attitude towards Weltliteratur and Anders Pettersson’s proposal of a transcultural view on literary history. All of these ideas can be sum up as attempts to find a new, global approach to literature, one that would be free of previous eurocentric thinking and open towards other cultures and literary traditions.


 

The missing part of (literary) history

The article is a review of Marta Baron-Milian’s Wat plus VAT, the first monograph about connections between economy and literature in Aleksander Wat’s work. The author tries to show Baron’s book as a part of wider phenomenon, which can be observed after the great crisis in 2008, as a result of returning of different humanistic approaches to the problems of capitalist economy. By analyzing “economic consciousnessˮ and literary strategies of Aleksander Wat (in his poetry, biography, short stories and essays), Baron reveals the theological, symbolic and linguistic basis of modern economy. It allows her to describe a specific literary “experience of economy” and penetrating analyze of main themes of Wat’s work. One of the aims of the review is to rethink Baron’s
proposition as a part of the new, thematically orientated history of polish modern literature. The other is to check, if Wat’s and Baron’s strictly modern and humanistic view of the economic systems can be still subversive and helpful against postmodern, mathematically reinforced capitalistic rhetoric.
 

Forgotten revolution? No and yes.

Agata Araszkiewicz’s book is a very interesting collection of possible ways of reading same novels from interwar period, novels written by women. By using tools mainly taken from feminist criticism such as écriture féminine or gynocriticism she builds interpretation of prose written by Aniela Gruszecka, Irena Krzywicka, Pola Gojawiczyńska, Wanda Melcer and Maria Kuncewiczowa. Araszkiewicz emphasizes it uniqueness, and by that she brings them back to history of polish literature. What is important to see, is that she focuses not only on poetics, but also on problems, themes, and, what is the most significant, on it’s aesthetic, what helps her to reveal revolutionary potential. Seen by Araszkiewicz, women’s novels from interwar period appeared not only as continuations of Young Poland poetic, but an innovative, multidimensional, autonomous space of literature with women’s signature.