Maciej Skowera

The article attempts to determine the constitutive elements of a model film fairy tale in the so-called Disney Golden Age and to examine how it was used in later works, both these created by the studio and those by unrelated creators. After preliminary remarks, the author analyses three feature-length animated films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). In these works, as he notes, one can notice a set of features that make up the classic Disney model of a film fairy tale. Next, the author discusses modifications applied to the pattern during the Disney Renaissance and Revival. Finally, he cites examples of cultural texts polemical to this paradigm which point to the cultural vitality and heterogeneity of the studio’s films.

The article is an analysis of the novel Kotka Brygidy [Brygida’s Cat] byJoanna Rudniańska and Bezsenność Jutki [Jutka’s Sleeplessness] by Dorota Combrzyńska-Nogala with regard to the way both texts present the relations between Poles and Jews as well as between children and adults during World War II. The author examines these works, among others, in the context of problems connected with historical prose for non-adultreaders and the Holocaust topics. He shows the overlapping Pole-Jew and child-adult relations in both texts, paying attention to the use of a child’s perspective helping to denounce the absurd of the Nazi practice of classification of people as Jewish and non-Jewish. The works under discussion are considered to be mental documents which are not historically faithful accountsof the time of the Shoahbut are intended to raisesensitivity and empathy in readers.

The text is an analysis of motifs of fire and water in Roksolanki by Szymon Zimorowic and in a cycle of erotic poems attributed to Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński. They are discussed in their original cultural context, corresponding with the aesthetic postulates of Baroque, serving realization of a known literary topos of aegritudo amoris and describing the motif of death out of love, popular in this era. The analysis, conducted in reference with findings of Paweł Stępień, Jan Błoński and Mirosława Hanusiewicz, ends with a conclusion according to which most issues present in the texts of both authors correspond with the conventions, but they also contain original content, connected with specific associations in the imagination of the poets. In Zimorowic’s works, it is a vision of two kinds of fire – a flame of God’s love and the Cupid’s fire – corresponding with the biography of the author of Roksolanki. For the author of the collection of erotic letters, the most important thing is showing water as an emblem of misfortune (which is also characteristic to those texts by Sęp, the authorship of which raises no doubts).