The article makes an attempt to show various options of interpretation of Ignacy Krasicki’s satirePijaństwo [Drunkenness]. The point of departure is a thorough analysis of the work, leading us to a conclusion that it has a many-sided sense. It concerns not only the eponymous phenomenon of abuse of spiritsbut also a psychological mechanism of justification of our own behaviours considered as negative, as well as the ineffectiveness of persuasion. It turns out that the characters indialogue actually deliver separate monologues, and the poet does not identify himself clearly with any of them, as he does not accept authoritative moralizing which takes heed neitherofspecific circumstances of the criticized phenomenon nor of the receiver’s viewpoint and opinions. An importantrole in the satire under discussion is also played by the category of comedy. The article also shows the relationship between the subject matter of Pijaństwo and the entire cycle of satiresby Krasicki, as well as some of his other works (particularly fables). 

The article makes an attempt to examine two plays by Krystyn Ostrowski based on hagiographic motifs. Święty Wojciech męczennik [Saint Adalbert the Martyr] presents the history of the Bishop of Prague from the noble familyoftheSlavniks, beginning from his miraculous healingin his infancy and ending with his martyrdom. The text Święta Elżbieta Węgierska [Saint Elizabeth of Hungary] shows such episodes as the arrival of the juvenile Hungarian princess to the Wartburg Castle, her marriage with Ludwig, the miracle of change of bread into roses, the exile and death of the saint. Although the portraits of Wojciech and the duchessof Thuringia were built in reference to earlier hagiographic works devoted to them, and therefore, essentially, to conventionalized elements of hagiographies, Ostrowski actually creates a modern image of the saints. He has also consistently connected the structure of vita with the scheme of passio, while the miracula were only used slightly. The characters, stripped of magnificence and pathos, have been brought somewhat closer to the level of perception typical to a 19th-century reader or viewer.

The article is an interpretation sketchof one poem by Zuzanna Ginczanka, a Polish poet of Jewish ancestry. The analyzed poem Pycha [Pride] may be considered representative for the early, pre-war output of Ginczanka, excellently exemplifying her evolution towards literary maturity, originality and literary consciousness. The sketch mainly presents the diversity of literary strategies used by the poet to show many dimensions of the experience of adolescence.

The article discusses the book Helga’s Diary. A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp. As a teenage girl, the author, Helga Weissova, used to keep notes registering the everyday life of a Jewish family from Prague during the Nazi occupation, and later, deportation and imprisonment in the Terezin camp. This unique account consists of a text written from a viewpoint of a child who was coming of age, and her drawings constituting a kind of a graphic account– a comic from the times of the Holocaust, as well as her post-war memoirs. The author, departing from reflectionson the notes of a teenage girl from Prague, takes up the subject of presentation of the Shoah topic in various forms of art, references the propaganda film by Kurt Gerron, the prose by W.S. Sebald, and artwork by Michal Rovner.

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 subject of the discussion is Jerzy Turowicz’s attitude to the issues of literature (based on queries in the decades when he was the editor-in-chief of “TP”, i.e. in the 1945-1995 half-century). The special position occupied by the journal from Krakow on the map of the communist-era Polish press is stressed. Since its establishment, this journal enjoyed wide and long-time support from the professor communityof the Jagiellonian University, as well as other academies of Krakow. Assorted accounts from poets and prose authors, including Marek Skwarnicki, Jan Józef Szczepański, Jan Twardowski and others, were discussed. Attention was paid to Turowicz’s outstanding merits in discovering and advocating of literary talents (with an example of Father Jan Twardowski and Maria Jarczyńska-Bukowska). Turowicz seldom wrote on poets and poetry, but he continuously monitoredboth domestic and emigrationliterature on this subject. He also had an extraordinary aesthetic sense which allowed him to selecttalented poets as his collaborators, and published authors whose fame wentmuch further than the borders of Poland (cases of Father Karol Wojtyła, Czesław Miłosz, Stanisław Lem and others). Only under Turowicz, Polish literature had such a wide and competent coverage in “TP”. Thanks to this, readers could acquaint themselves with the foremost pens of literary criticism and were becomingthoroughly oriented in the Polish and world’s literature. It seems that since Turowicz’s passing, “Tygodnik Powszechny” has not played such a role in this regard anymore.

The author of the sketch examines the genesis of nostalgia in the works of an outstanding novelist Jan Józef Szczepański (1919-2003). It stems both from the historical experience and the moral principles taken by the authorofPolish Autumn,in his life and rich output, from Joseph Conrad. The defense of the Conrad’s ethos in the authoritarian system of the People’s Republic of Poland had been Szczepański’s principal task since his debut until late 1990s. The nostalgia is strongest in the following works: Mija dzień [The Day Is Passing](1994), Jeszcze nie wszystko [Not Everything Yet] (1997), Rozłogi (1997), Obiady przy świecach [Candlelight Dinners] (2003), published in the last decade of his life full of manhood and various suffering.