The article is devoted to the prose debut of Tadeusz Nowak; however, the volume Przebudzenia [Awakenings] is interpreted in the context of his later writings. The suggestions concerning the interpretation of the title word point at some notions crucial for understanding Nowak’s prose writing: the feeling of yearning for what has been lost and suffering incurred by the awareness of lack. The shape of a circle plays a significant role in these deliberations, since repetition seems to be the antidote for fading away and dying. Writing – here also understood as a form of repetition – becomes a necessary and continually undertaken attempt to heal the wound caused by the experience of loss.

The article is an interpretative text focusing on the poem Jak się przed tobą wytłumaczę [How Will I Explain Myself to You] from the 1956 volume Prorocy już odchodzą [The Prophets are Leaving Already]. The deliberations come directly from the text of the poem and focus on questions such as the reversal of the topos of the  Prodigal Son, melancholy, “the traitor’s complex” (Stanisław Balbus’s term) as a generational and “class” experience, and last but not least, the relation of the poem to the whole volume and to later poetry of Tadeusz Nowak. On the formal level, some difficulties connected with the poem’s intended reader, which cause some imbalance of the lyrical form, are discussed, as well as the peculiar rhyme structure which allows the reader to “decipher” hidden key words.

Tadeusz Nowak, the author of Psalm codzienny [Everyday Psalm] not only plays the role of a continuator of this genre in the second half of the 20th century, but also is a restorer of the form. The world presented in his stanzaic, regular poems is permeated by pain and undeserved but inevitable suffering. On the other hand, in his poems it is difficult to find a clear and typical elements of Biblical psalms: the feeling of stability and care, trust or faith. However, the article is not only an attempt at classifying this interpretatively difficult poem according to genre, but also a study of the rural reality of the mid-20th century (particular motifs are described in separate sections). Nowak combines the Biblical tradition with folklore, draws on the rich symbolism of numbers, refers to the Decalogue and Commandments of the Church, as well as looks deep inside the human and doesn’t shy away from showing their flaws and faults. Hence, both in the article and in the poem the refrain recurs again and again: “next to the man there lies / an angel tied with a wire / a herring skeleton glass / next to the man there lies / a crucified god.” These apparently insignificant mundane objects, which (apparently) do not match the sphere of the sacred, gain new senses in Nowak’s poem. The simple reality and that “folkloric clutter” cease to be any cultural “junk” and become rediscovered jewels of tradition.

Among the Poles who after the Second World War remained beyond reach of Stalin’s power and decided not to return to their homeland military veterans were a particularly numerous and active group. It is they who played a huge role in organizing that wave of emigration in their countries of settlement and called the tune in the social and, especially, political life of war refugees. The memory of fight and loses suffered in war formed the basis of the myth of heroic Polish soldier that emerged in emigration. It became one of the pillars of the collective political identity of post-Yalta emigration. Not only did it contribute to shaping its ideological coherence, but also set out the goals of further fight, this time only political and not military one. Using a variety of primary sources, the author of the present article tries to answer the question about the role which the motif of blood sacrificed by the Polish soldier played in the symbolic representations of post-Yalta emigration, as well as about the political function those representations had.

The experience of the Holocaust and concentration camps has still been insufficiently described in the dimension of gender. The experiences of women and men were different, and so are their respective accounts. The essay A Beautiful Woman’s Chance proposes beauty as a category for describing the female experience of internment and extermination. It turns out that reading testimonies and literary texts through such a “filter” of corporeality reveals a lot of examples which show that beauty did play a role in extermination of women.

For Bobkowski, maintaining individual freedom grounded in material independence and achieved by one’s own work was an essential existential question. The financial freedom and independence were a declaration, a life motto and an economic programme all at once. As a result, the writer’s idea came down to changing the  status of a political émigré into an economic one who simultaneously stands on the side of freedom for his Country.

The article discusses in detail a poem by Leopold Staff entitled Ogrodnicy [Gardeners]. The main object of the hermeneutic and structural analysis of this poem is the “topos of the gardener.” It appears in writings of authors strongly influenced by the classical tradition, and Staff was a Neoclassicist. The poem Ogrodnicy can be read as a text from this tradition. Its analysis is meant to characterize the topos of the gardener and point at the role of a modern poet and modern Polish literature.

Papusza was a unique personality and her songs are unique as well. However, her gypsy literature is not very well known because of its immanent qualities. It is rather considered of secondary importance and is treated only contextually. Its most important aspect is the legend around Papusza. Thus, in this article, I will focus on the literature (embedded in the context of biography and cultural practices). My aim is to look at Papusza’s songs from new research perspectives. As a tool for the analysis I will use strategies of reading developed by geopoetics and ethnopoetics, and, marginally, by feminist research. In the centre of the discussion there will be the notion of the space of the forest. The imaging of this site is, in fact, a common area of analysis for the above-mentioned methodologies.