Jan Zięba

The article undertakes the attempt to describe Stanisław Lem’s views on the topic of the nature of poetry, literature and creative process. The process of this artistic auto-reflexion takes course in the shadow of the Holocaust and amidst the literary confrontation with poets of three generations that took place throughout the first few post-war decades. Crucial proves to be the confrontation with the contemporaries (in the context of reviews dedicated to Baczyński and Rożewicz from 1947 and 1948), which allows us to formulate two alternative models of literature and to declare oneself in favour of one of the sides. The memory of Holocaust, as well as post-war reading of Bolesław Leśmian’s and Ewa Lipska’s poetry results in changes to the juvenile aesthetic declarations. Unchanged however, remains the vitalist element already highlighted in 1945 in the Lem’s letter to Marian Hemar: “to write is to live”.

The article is an attempt to interpret the food themes that often appear in Stanisław Lem’s novels, interviews and correspondence. Most attention is devoted to Hospital of the Transfiguration, a novel that was the author’s first literary attempt to confront the experience of World War II. The knowledge about Lem’s life in German-occupied Lviv, significantly expanded due to biographical research from recent years (especially thanks to the books of Agnieszka Gajewska and Wojciech Orliński), made it possible to link the “food cipher” noticed in this novel with the most painful experience of war extermination that was carefully hidden by Lem. Some ideas of Michel Foucault and Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as the concept of “messianic vitalism” developed by Agata Bielik-Robson, turn out to be helpful in understanding the particular thanatic-alimentary coupling in Lem’s work.