Alfred Döblin and Joseph Roth wrote their texts about Poland and Polish Jews at the same time (1924–1927). Th e article not only compares their works, but also documents that Roth might have felt called upon by Döblin to write essays Th e Wandering Jews. He was indebted to Döblin for giving him the courage to publicly admit his East-Jewish roots and was inspired by his subjective, personal narrative. In several passages he refers to Journey in Poland and enters into dialogue with Döblin.

This article analyses the relationship between the subject and the landscape in Avrom Sutzkever’s early poetry (primarily focusing on compositions published in the volumes Lider [Poems], from 1937, and Valdiks [Forested], from 1940). Th e author explores the matter of epiphanic experience of landscape – wherein the stake is the search for  metaphysical sense within nature – that is a dominant feature of Sutzkever’s pre-war poetry. The way these epiphanies are depicted reveals the romantic–modernist provenance of the early poetic compositions of this Yiddish writer.

The author of this paper provides a synthetic discussion of the image of the Warsaw Ghetto in Polish poetry, prose, and drama. The Warsaw Ghetto is the one with most literary representations among all of the ghettos that have existed in the territories that were part of the Second Polish Republic before the war. Th e scholar presents the topic in  chronological order, discussing the image of the closed Warsaw district during wartime, in the post-war era, the Stalinist period, the time from the 1950s to the 1980s, and after the year 1989. Th e most notable changes in the ghetto imagery occur after the year 1989, and are associated with the abolishment of censorship, the invasion of pop-cultural  reframings of the subject, and the debuts of writers born after the war. In his analysis the author also considers texts that do not take up the topic of the Warsaw Ghetto directly and he points to traces that open up the possibility of classifying those texts as works about the Warsaw city-beyond-the-wall.

This paper concerns the literary output of third-generation Polish Jews, especially the compositions of Piotr Paziński, who is the most recognized member of this generation. An analysis of the literary achievement of this author brings to light the features characteristic for the entire group and elucidates the way its representatives perceive the  Holocaust and the history of Jews in Poland. Most space in third-generation works is taken up by the writers’ struggle with memory, as authors attempt to grasp and safeguard the memories of a world which gradually slips into obscurity, and to revive a bygone reality. Nevertheless, they approach this challenge diff erently than the generation of their parents, which was touched by family trauma, or the very survivors themselves.

The presentation of the contents and compositional layout of Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s two-volume work Pod klątwą. Społeczny portret pogromu kieleckiego is guided by refl ections that go beyond a classical book review and a reconstruction of events that occurred on 4 July 1946. Th e interdisciplinary nature of Tokarska-Bakir’s work (history sensu stricto, social history, microhistory, ethnology, cultural anthropology and historical anthropology, discourse analysis, forensic science), the skilful fusion of intellectual discipline and methodological rigorousness with literary qualities, the revision of previously established interpretative conclusions (e.g., rebuttal of the provocation hypothesis), as well as the air of actuality (in the context of debates centred on the experience of post-war years and the historical roots of Polish identity) all make this book one of the greatest achievements of Polish humanities in recent times. Th is paper focuses on three things. Firstly, on the phenomenon of continuity and long duration that are revealed by the analysis of events from 4 July 1946. Secondly, on the pogrom themes: terror, macabre, bloodiness and the instruments of murder, Th irdly, on the compositional and generic structure of Joanna Tokarska-Bakir’s book.

This study attempts to depict the complicated image of Zygmunt Lubicz-Zaleski (1882–1967) as an intellectual writer, whose spiritual formation suggest both the innovativeness of ideas and their intriguing anachronism. Th e intellectualism of the author of Relikwiarz buchenwaldzki spans in a very baffl ing way the space between Romantic and neo-Romantic infl uences and the modernist movement; this is manifested with full force by his Dziennik nieciągły set down in the years 1904–1925, partly as a dream and experience journal – inspired by the ideas of Andrzej Towiański, Adam Mickiewicz, the ‘genesis’ period of Juliusz Słowacki, and works of Zygmunt Krasiński – that was also an unparalleled diary of civic virtue. Th e most suggestive depiction of this is found in the preface to Dziennik (that was added only in 1967), where Lubicz-Zaleski – while discussing the question of his own diaristic style – performs a criticism of ‘Proustism’ from a clearly egocentric, ‘Rousseaian’ standpoint.

This paper focuses on a central category of literary communication, namely, the category of the writer, which is currently under constant scrutiny and is strongly dependent upon codes of popular culture. Th e text presents the various ways in which this notion functions and is understood (for example through its descriptive, evaluative, relative, and contextual framings) as well scrutinizes the rules of its usage in diverse publications and everyday linguistic practice. Th is example sets the stage for a broader problematic referring to the operative functionality of terminology employed by literary studies that is subjected to various test of particular usage. Th e aim of this paper is also the description of such a model of culture that does not merely encompass the process of creating literature but also the ways in which literature is used to gain status on the literary market. Th is text describes the shift from the model of writer as “thinker,” “creator of discourse,” “author of works that merit attention and consideration,” to the model of writer as “celebrity,” “showman,” “idol,” “star,” who limits himself to the presence in the media and in the public sphere.