Paweł Bukowiec

The author discusses the textual traces of writings by Adam Mickiewicz in Józef Albin Herbaczewski’s Polish-language essays. In early 20th century, Herbaczewski, or Juozas Albinas Herbačiauskas (pen name: Junutis Vienuolis, born on 20 October 1876 in the Lithuanian region of Suvalkija, died on 3 December 1944 in Cracow) had published several books concerning – in general – the cultural dimension of Lithuanian-Polish relations (the most important in the discussion by the author of the sketch are: Amen, Głos bólu and I nie wódź nas na pokuszenie…). Years later, the disproportion, characteristic of this publicism, between the scale of political visions and the mediocrity of the cultural foundation on which the prophecies have been based, is striking. Herbaczewski made Mickiewicz the cornerstone of these weak foundations. In this case, the principle of reception is radical reductionism: the author of Głos bólu reduces the titan of Polish literature to the role of an executor-implementer of a single subject: freedom of the Lithuanian and Polish nation. In the present sketch, this issue is discussed in two perspectives: first, in its own right, and second, as an exemplification of something that can be called the literary imperative of freedom.

The Need for Subversiveness in Studies on Borderlands

The word „pogranicze” (in rough translation: borderland) gets more and more popular in Polish humanities as the equivalent of untranslatable and inconvenient „Kresy”, the first being free of polonocentric, colonial conotations of the latter. The article: presents the logic of a map as fundamental to the notion „pogranicze”, discusses its discoursive consequences and points to the need of deconstructive, subversive uses of the term.
 

This paper is an attempt at alter-globalist criticism of the contemporary discourse of world literature from the perspective of a researcher of two small European literatures (namely, Polish and Lithuanian). Beginning with classical definitions, the study analyses concrete proposals of the canon of world literature in order to indicate its violent character and prove the existence of the principle of “spoilage” of information inscribed in the criticised discourse.