Jakub Osiński
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 13, Issue 3, 2016, pp. 242-259
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.16.015.6334The article is devoted to poems by Kazimierz Wierzyński written during World War I, and published in the volume The Great Bear, 1923. During the war the poet served in the Austrian army and was taken prisoner by the Russians; in 1915–1918 he stayed in a POW camp in Ryazan. There he met Yelena Maslova, who he fell unhappily in love with. In this unhappy love the author of the article tries to find the key to understanding the analyzed poems. They were created at the same time as the vitalistic verses from the volume Spring and Wine, but are kept in a completely different, pessimistic tone. In his detailed analysis of poems “A Letter Home” and “To My Mother,” the author uses anthropological works concerning home (Mircea Eliade, Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger) and findings of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, and thus, on the basis of the biographical context, he demonstrates that the unrequited love of the young poet was related to the lack of maternal love in early childhood.
Jakub Osiński
Konteksty Kultury, Volume 15 Issue 4, 2018, pp. 532-544
https://doi.org/10.4467/23531991KK.18.047.10589This 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).