The author of the article presents Fiodor Dostoyevski’s nihilistic vision of nature and the man’s place in it, with special emphasis placed on the writer’s attempts at demonizing nature. The paper is not meant to be a voice in the discussion concerning the notion of nihilism as such, neither does it discuss all aspects of nihilism in Dostoyevski’s writing.
In their attempts at demonizing nature, the nihilist can go two ways. In the first case, the starting point is a mechanistic vision of nature and the acceptance of the absurdity of the situation of a conscious being in a world conceived this way; this causes a reaction of outrage and protest in the nihilist. This protest, in turn, generates a “funny” thought about the demonic character of nature. In the other case, the demonic character of nature is revealed to the nihilist in the act of direct observation; it awakens the feeling of aversion and an attitude of rejection. Such an image of nature is then subjected by the nihilist to rational processing, as a result of which it gains the value of validity and the allure of commonness and openness to the world. It shouldn’t be forgotten, however, that this image is not a product of the so-called natural cognitive powers of the nihilist but of the irrational layer of his personality. The author of the paper points at such attitudes in Dostoyevski’s characters and discusses consequences of adopting them.

The aim of the article is to present the relation of the English writer of Polish origin Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski to Warsaw. Poland’s capital played a special role in Conrad’s childhood. The boy accompanied his parents, who organized conspiracy, before the outbreak of the 1863 Rising, and he had to witness his father’s imprisonment and trial, and later, together with his parents, go into exile to Vologda. That stay in Warsaw was a traumatic experience for the boy and later it was reflected in Conrad’s writing. The paper also describes two other stays in Warsaw (in 1890 and 1893), when Conrad was already a citizen of Britain, Navy captain and beginning writer. The whole is concluded by presenting Warsaw as the main centre of editing and researching Conrad’s writing.

More and more papers are being written on religious and metaphysical motifs in Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry. In this article I try to show how Herbert drew inspiration from the way of recognizing gods by the pre-Socratics, who were active in times of crisis of the traditionally understood religion and who faced the collapse of the then system of beliefs. I show that in his poetry, Herbert often talks not about the mythological gods, but about gods referred to by the first philosophers, who were just beginning to work out the philosophical concepts. At a time when Homer was still the model of the narrative, the first philosophers began to construct general notions largely based on rational reasoning and observation but originating from basic intuitions. I make a claim that when attempting to depict Herbert’s religious search, one should consider traces of inspiration visible in his work and coming from the questions and everything that contributed to both these questions and the cosmic, metaphysical and religious beliefs, of the intellectual formation whose representatives were Xenophanes, Heraclitus and also Democritus and Anaxagoras. These philosophers used gods rather as rhetorical figures, which Herbert himself noted in an interview. Traces of the pre-Socratics are present not only in the words of Zbigniew Herbert, but also in many of his poems, in correspondence, as well as his essays, plays, and poetic prose.

The article discusses a key issue in the writings of Imre Kertész (1929–2016), that is, contemplation on the effects of the concentration-camp trauma on the further life of survivors. In his books, the author touches upon problems faced by former inmates of concentration camps, often drawing on his own experience. The Nobel Prize winner reflects upon the former prisoners’ personalities, their problems in building relationships and their image of love and family distorted by war experiences. He also stresses the fact that many of them, unable to adapt to normal life, decided to commit suicide, while his escape from the trauma was just his writing.

 

The paper discusses the issue of imagery in language and visual culture. The focus is on the cognitive-cultural foundations of the interplay between the visual image and linguistic imagery. Our analysis concerns Czesław Miłosz’s Turner and the corresponding painting by William Turner Chateau de St. Michael, Bonneville, Savoy (1803), both of which are regarded as cognitive tools that help maintain the continuity of culture across space and time. It is argued that the linguistic prompts and the visualisation complement each other. In Miłosz’s poem, not only lexical, but also grammatical choices are meaningful, enabling to evoke in the reader’s mind vivid mental images. The poet’s linguistic choices guide the attention of the reader, and, at once, the beholder of the visualisation, facilitating a better understanding of the artist’s mind: his perception and sensitivity to particular aspects of the iconosphere that he decided to capture in his painting, making his vision forever contemporary.

Based on a BA thesis, the article is an attempt to analyze over a hundred accounts of survivors of the Volhynia massacre, referring to the category of testimony. The author tries to find answers to the questions of how to speak about a genocide which cannot be expressed in words and why to speak about it. The author examines the personal accounts using the tools of literary criticism. The categories of time, space and silence are taken into account. Ways of creating the images of the perpetrators and the very descriptions of the crime are also analyzed, with the focus on factors that contribute to producing a given perception of reality by the survivors. Thus, among other things, the role played by the senses and religious affinity in a traumatic experience is examined.