The author returns to The Salt of the Earth conceived in the mythic-ritual context. She presents characteristic elements of the plot that allow us to interpret the fortunes of the main character through the prism of the initiation ritual. However, what she proposes differs from previous interpretations of the novel. She concludes that by using the poetics of myth and the initiation model the author not only demythologizes war, but also presents a diagnosis of the situation of European civilization on the eve of the cataclysm of World War II. Wittlin also passes judgment on fascination with the primeval myth, as well as on simplistic concepts of the return to a state of unblemished nature, which was supposed to be an antidote to the civilizational threats of the time.

The author also contemplates the meaning of the presentation of the protagonist of the novel, Piotr Niewiadomski, as an innocent simpleton. By using the context of the initiation ritual, we can understand Niewiadomski’s journey as a path to recognizing one’s situation in the world leading to rebellion but culminating in cognition and self-awareness. However, the novel’s protagonist does not fully achieve these aims. He remains a person who is incapable of carrying knowledge about the world and about conscious participation. Therefore, in The Salt of the Earth Wittlin poses a question about the responsibility all of us bear for evil, including that resulting from simplifications and from mythologization. 

This article tries to characterize irony in Józef Wittlin’s The Salt of the Earth, also in reference to the author’s other texts. The author refers to the most important twentieth century methodology of the study of irony as well as to the scholars who study Wittlin’s work, including: D.S. Muecke, D. Sperber i D. Wilson, B. Alleman, W. Szturc, P. Łaguna oraz K. Jakowska, Z. Yurieff, and E. Wiegandt.

Here, irony is treated as the attitude of a worldview that formed in part due to the experience of World War I. Thanks to the ironic view of reality (which in the very text of The Salt of the Earth is evident, for example, at the stylistic level) the author succeeds in saving his own world of values, which in this way is subject to Bakhtinian carnivalization.

The aim of the article is to present the individual and intense experience of sensing the world in religious categories, an account of which can be found in the novel The Salt of the Earth. The term “religious experience” comes from William James. The author of the article first mentions the interpretative difficulties connected with structural irony, which calls into question some of the statements verbalized in the novel. Taking into account this complexity, he points out four elements that justify discussion of a religious experience in The Salt of the Earth. First, he points to the title, which evokes a religious perception of the world, and assumes a response to a calling that comes from God. Second, he refers to the Prologue (deprived of structural irony), which introduces the theme of war as blasphemy. Third, he analyses those passages in which the narrator shortens his distance from Piotr Niewiadomski’s point of view and approvingly accepts the magical interpretation of natural phenomena. Lastly, he refers to the Christian-Orphic-Hutsul theme of the immortality of the soul and contact with the dead.

This article discusses Józef Wittlin’s literary exploration of the idea of modern sainthood. It argues that Wittlin’s search for a new model of saintly life that would respond to the modern age was informed by the ongoing theological debates about the meaning and value of traditional hagiography. The article demonstrates that Wittlin’s reflections were inspired by Paul Sabatier’s influential study Vie de saint François d’Assise (Life of Saint Francis of Assisi), and informed by the immediate socio-political context (the Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918–1919 and the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe). Ultimately, Wittlin’s writings reinvent Saint Francis as a modern-day saint who shows a radical empathy with the persecuted and the marginalised, above all the Jews. Responding to growing anti-Semitism that was endorsed by a number of nationalist and Roman Catholic groups, Wittlin reimagines Saint Francis as a social activist who gives active attention to the suffering of the vilified “other” who has been rejected by mainstream society.