The article discusses the subject matter of filiations between literature and music. It is an attempt to look at one of the later works of Karol Hubert Rostworowski, namely, Czerwony marsz [The Red March], through the prism of operatic conventions. The point of departure for the considerations above is an article by Piotr Strugała and the term “operatics” adopted by him, utilized in reference to the play under analysis. In Rostworowski’s drama, operatic conventions are revealed at the level of structure, subject matter, as well as semantics of the work. The first one is the architectural form of the play, i.e. division into three preludes and the eponymous Red March. The “operatics” is also evidenced by such elements as: presence of solo and ensemble parts, partially corresponding to arias, recitatives and choral parts; dancing parts; leitmotifs; marching rhythms; as well as spectacularity and impressiveness.

The goal of the article is a proposal to read the output of Franz Kafka through the prism of Gnostic beliefs and ideas. The author, having noticed a certain convergence between the Gnostic experience of existence and the vision of the world presented in the works of Kafka, tries to seek the convergences between the former and the latter. The point is not to prove that The Trial, or any other work by the writer, may be subject to a full, self-contained and comprehensive Gnostic interpretation, let alone that Kafka was a Gnostic. The author of the article only suggests a different way of looking at The Trial, as just another tool used to extract different senses and new meanings from the work. The sketch analyses Kafka’s novel, focusing, consequently, on the Gnostic anthropology, the vision of reality, the question of the Law, and the possibility of salvation. The adopted perspective enables new readings of Kafka’s work, and the interpretation, on the one hand, stresses the demiurgic nature of Kafka’s Law, and on the other hand, seems to be an optimistic reading through underlining the possibility and role of salvation

The text is an interpretation of the poem serce podchodzi do gardła [heart rises to throat] from the volume Wyjście [Exit], pointing out the elements of Różewicz’s self-lustration after 2004. Whereas the poet previously used to explain his involvement in communism with objective necessity (so-called building of poetry after Auschwitz), 15 years after Poland’s independence, Różewicz justifies his involvement through a manipulated post-war biography and a Biblical vision of a personal and national disaster. Regardless of the view of the legitimacy of such reasoning, the poem bears evidence to full understanding that the year of 1989 has changed the criteria for evaluation of attitudes, and these, in turn, shed a new light on the issue of the poet’s forced desertion from a Home Army unit in November 1944 and participation in the “civil disgrace”. The article also attempts to pay attention to the tragedy of that decision and its psychological, political and military conditioning. Indirectly, it also evidences the necessity to write a new history of the post-war literature from the perspective of the regained independence.

The article, which is inspired by the poem Tadeusz Różewicz homework (always section), raises the question of “poetic self-portrait” and on the basis of expression of the poet, and with reference to the specifics of the forms of personal documents (autobiography, self-portrait), tries features that it could be characterized. Structural axis of the text is the triad of concepts: “face, memory, mirror”, which lies close to the problem of identity, having to work Różewicz great importance.

The word and truth philosophy hidden in the novel Kamień na kamieniu [Stone upon Stone] references the principles of oral culture. The author consciously, through mouths of his characters, delivers a peculiar lecture on word and truth, scored for many episodes – a treatise with a mindset rooted in the folk, pre-writing way of understanding of reality. In Myśliwski’s oral world, the know-ledge of the meaning of words is tantamount to the knowledge of the principles of existence among people. Under Myśliwski’s approach, tale telling is a kind of a spiritual journey to the most primordial existential experiences. The basic function of a word becomes the unveiling of the existential worry. Speech turns out to be a vehicle bringing out from human beings what really connects them. It is only the revealed worry that removes the obstacles separating the participants of a conversation, unveils their deepest identity and their common human fate. For the novel’s narrator, understanding is a kind of a final existential opening to the Other, is a co-experiencing of the Other.

The hero of Myśliwski’s novel values the myth of himself in accordance with the standards of the oral culture. He seems to regard the flat reality of facts as less valuable than the information from the sphere of axiology and existence. To him, the message of a myth is a truth much more important than the truth of events

The article focuses on the analysis of the issue of postmemory (a term by M. Hirsch) on the basis of materials (narrative interviews with persons brought up by Holocaust survivors) collected by Mikołaj Grynberg in the collection Oskarżam Auschwitz. Opowieści rodzinne [I Accuse Auschwitz. Family Tales] (published in 2014). The goal of the text is to present and attempt to interpret the experiences of “the generation after” in the context of the phenomenon of intergenerational transmission of memories, as well as to point out the destructive mechanisms and consequences of postmemory. Searching for an answer to the question about the effect of a wartime trauma on the identity of those who have suffered it and those who have inherited it as postmemory, the author references, among others, the thought of M. Hirsch, H. Raczymow and E. Sicher.

The article discusses the book We władzy pozoru [Ruled by the appearance] by Aleksander Fiut, containing sixteen sketches and essays written between 2006 and 2014. They examine the Polish post-war literature which, according to Fiut, has not ended in 1989. The subject matter of this literature, the presented problems and the issues brought up by individual writers are set by the author in wide social, historical, cultural and ideological contexts. The researcher enriched his narrative with a polysemantic category of “appearance” and the overly broadened concepts of “totalitarian state”, “totalitarian system”, turning these terms into a methodological key to the understanding of the Polish reality and literature from 1945 to 1989 and, subsequently, in the modern times. Especially until 1989, according to A. Fiut, we used to be ruled only by appearances. The author of the sketch opposes the one-sided vision of the past, regarded by him to be overly simplified. The important book by Aleksander Fiut fits into the very significant and valuable trend of present reckonings and revisions of the past. However, when pursuing the truth, it is important that we should not give in to the snares of appearances of our epoch as well.

The sketch constitutes an attempt at interpretation and systematization of the novel series A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. The author tries to pay attention to several assorted elements comprising the unquestionable phenomenon of popularity of A Game of Thrones and the subsequent books of the cycle. The analysis examines, above all, the eponymous concept of game, transferred by Martin on many levels: a game with the reader, both literary and psychological, including a game played with topoi, myths, genres and allusions to the history and sources of the European culture. The latter ones seem to be particularly interesting in the context of revival of the idea of education in the master-disciple relation or the method of heuresis. It is also worth noticing that Martin has made a book an object – a key, an artifact, a symbol. Another issue that deserves attention is the use of the motif of the Other – the stranger in A Song of Ice and Fire, especially in the context of the American author’s care for setting the novel in the realities of the ancient and medieval world

The article examines the subject matter of broadly understood contextual learning in modern Polish-language education. Contextual education, also formerly known as correspondence of arts, is hardly a new issue in teaching of Polish language and literature, yet there is still a need to update it and provide teachers philologically prepared for their work, with tools for work with various texts of culture. The article is an another proposal of intertextual analysis and interpretation of two products of culture: the painting Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer and the poem Dziewczynka Vermeera [Vermeer’s Girl] by Adam Zagajewski. It presents a method of work with an iconic and literary text at a lesson of Polish, showing how one can perform, step by step, a complementary analysis and interpretation of texts belonging to two different sign systems. To this end, the method employs the model of “reading of paintings”, functioning for many years in the French education, as well as elements of classic Polish-philology analysis of a poetic text