Jerzy Marek

Two essays, Ada-Kaleh, Ada-Kaleh by Mircea Cărtărescu and Między magią a zniszczeniem (Between magic and destruction) by Fatos Lubonji are the starting point of the considerations on the decay. People are not the only victims of communist dictators of Romania and Albania. By destroying the old and building the new, they complete the work of destruction of the landscape and, thus, the memory. The oriental island on the Donau river, sunk during the construction of a power plant, is for Cărtărescu the mythological Atlantis, which has survived as a myth against Ceauşescu’s will. Old Albanian villages from Lubonja’s essay survived the times of Hoxha in a damaged form, however now they are threatened by wildly developing capitalism. The author indicates similarities between both essays. They are connected not only by the communist apprehension of the reality but also by the elegiac and melancholic tone of the essayists – people who are aware that the decay is an inevitable consequence of each existence.

Kazimierz Orłoś is known primarily as an outstanding realist writer. The article perceives this aspect: Zimorodek is a brutal story about humiliation of a decent man in the presence of a child. However, the author also wanted to indicate other possibilities of reading Orłoś’s prose and to put emphasis on the metaphysical subject matter present in the story. In his interpretation, Zimorodek becomes a story about the evil which is present in the world and about the impossibility of theodicy. The evil, personified here in the form of three criminals, excludes the existence of a good God in a Manichean way.

The article offers a commentary on the correspondence of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Kazimierz Orłoś during 1958–1974. The author reconstructs the evolution of the relationship of the two authors – from the initial courtesy of a debutant towards the master to the cooling of their relations due to the peculiarity of the literary life in the “Polish People’s Republic”. The article presents two attitudes towards the reality of that time. The unequivocal political choices of Kazimierz Orłoś, so much different from the servilistic strategy adopted by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, were the reason that, despite the social affinities and the mutual respect for their work, the two writers had to part ways.