The author of the article analyzes the difference between Nestbeschmutzer and favorites of the political systems. The former are often precisely defined, clearer in their views, the latter are seen as “blurred. ”The latter often play on two fronts, and they eagerly identify with the figure of Konrad Wallenrod. Such social circles were best described by Jerzy Andrzejewski and Leopold Tyrmand, but the discussion around Piotr Wierzbicki’s work was impactful as well. The author of the article juxtaposes historical and contemporary contexts. Collaboration is therefore analyzed as a strategy towards the power, as well as the authority’s efforts to enforce loyalty among its subjects.

The obscene aspects of power are the guilty pleasures of the insecure “Schongeister.” They are the reason for artists and intellectuals to join the ruling camp –a reason perhaps more frequent and an incentive stronger than fear and opportunism. This underestimated background of the motivations in the spectacle of power –both under communism and today, when power comes from a democratic mandate – is analyzed here using the observations offered by contemporary psychoanalytic thought.

The paper is a hermeneutic attempt at parallel, messianic reading of the two modern narratives – Melville’s story about Bartleby, the poor scrivener and the Freudian joke about the French king. The main point of the text is to speculatively treat these two formulas as the acts of resistance, which succeeded in overcoming and disenchanting what Foucault calls the Power. The author treats the novella and the joke as parables which are inherently ironic and comic in the Hegelian sense, which means, that they operate on and thus shatter the symbolic order and such dichotomies as the lack and the excess, the transcendental and the material as well as the absolute and the concrete. Confronting the readings of “Bartleby” by Deleuze and Derrida and supplementing them with Bloch’s messianic hope, enables the author to claim, that the scrivener and the jester are figures of subversion, if not revolution. What comes next is the analysis of above-mentioned allegories that use theories of comedy by Zupančič, and McGowan, showing that they are in fact the stories about becoming of the modern subject and the latter one emerges in the structure of the comic play of power and resistance. The paper claims that scrivener and the jester show us that there is, in fact, hope for the fragile and precarious modern being mercilessly subjugated to the power.

The article’s main subject is the complex mechanism of observation and participation in the spectacles of sadism and cruelty prevalent during the Great Depression in the United States. A particular focus was given to They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy among other literary and art cases. Literary narratives focused on dance marathons are analyzed, apart from a literary-critical perspective, in the light of the history of theater and entertainment, and the history of economics. An in-depth presentation of the circumstances of the economic crisis allows us to see the dynamics of changes in literary conventions (including Hollywood narratives) as part of the historical-literary process, as well as the collapse of the American narrative about success and liberation through a career in the entertainment industry. The article proposes to consider cultural representations of the dance marathon as a sadistic spectacle in which the suffering of others becomes a short-term entertainment – enabled by a clear division between participants and spectators, and the common understanding of the competition as a springboard to success in Hollywood. Tracing the collapse of this narrative (as well as the lethality of this promise) is an essential point in the essay’s conclusion.

The paper addresses the work of an enfant terrible of the post-war Austrian culture, Thomas Bernhard, by posing questions about the relation between veridiction and a proper Nestbeschmuzung. Bernhard was frequently downplayed as a sarcastic and spiteful madman who drew sick pleasure from insulting his community. Nonetheless, as I demonstrate in the paper, the unveiling of systemic violence in Bernhard’s oeuvre reaches much deeper than just paresia. Bernhard’s prose has a structure of the fugue in which protagonists struggle with their own subjectification and objectification. It is precisely this structure of the fugue that possesses unmasking and paresiastic functions that go beyond the role of insults which make up a good part of the content this structure gives a form to. Ultimately, the fugue is a strategy to counter the overwhelming power and seek the subjectification outside of its realm.

The article is an attempt to look at the post-war essays of Hanna Mortkowicz- Olczakowa from the perspective of socialist realist poetics and its individual negotiation by the writer herself. The main subject of the analysis, a collection of essayistic reports about Nowa Huta, is interpreted in the article with references to the writer’s biography (of an assimilated Jewish woman of intelligentsia), and by close reading of her anachronistic literary stylizations that she employed to describe a new socialist landscape.

The aim of this paper is to present a detailed analysis and interpretation of two poems: A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and At the Top of My Voice (1930). The first, in the manner of an extended metaphor, announces the necessity of redefining the political and social reality, while the latter, concerns itself with the accounts settled in the Soviet reality. In the poet’s lyrical (post-futuristic) attempts one can very often find a lively apologia for the ideas of the constructed system: support for revolutionary movements, a proposal to create generally accessible, universally comprehensible art for the masses. In a much later poem from the 1930s, Mayakovsky again and again, expresses his failure in conveying his political ideas and rebellion, which – in his opinion – has its cause in the misunderstanding of his work. These issues are often presented by the author of The Bedbug in the form of bitter irony, in a style and imagery distinctive of him. On the basis of texts by 20th century literature researchers, as well as in reference to the biography of Mayakovsky, the study analyses various themes and their execution in the selected works of the poet.

This article proposes perceiving the Targowica Confederation of 1792 and its later myth as a Polish uncanny (unheimlich) phenomenon. I present my reasoning through an analysis of treason cases during the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794. Legal institutions at that time were working on such affairs in a slow manner thus social unrests were needed to trigger more radical decisions on judging the treacherous deeds. This indolence was due to the elites’ fear of defining all nobles who received money from the foreign states as traitors. From this perspective Targowica becomes a symbol or a synecdoche not only of a treason but also of noblemen’s negative traits. As a result it is simultaneously well-known and disturbing, i.e. uncanny.

The aim of the article is to present the creation process of Napoleon’s figure in Polish poetry from the period of the Duchy of Warsaw. It presents how the perception of his power changed depending on the political situation. The article also points out the influence of culture and religion on creating the figure of a ruler. Examples of poetry relating to historical events such as the treaties of Tilsit or the defeat during the Moscow campaign show how the social mood and attitude to power have changed. The analysis of the poetic language and connections with various areas of culture were crucial for creating the figure of Napoleon as a ruler. Poets like Wincenty Turski, Franciszek Wężyk and Józef Skorkowski focus on the military merit of Napoleon. They use metaphors and other stylistic devices related to the sphere of the sacred and to the Greek and Roman mythology. Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz and Kajetan Koźmian in their poems describe images of death and defeat of marching devastated troops. All in all, in Polish poetry from the period of the Duchy of Warsaw we can compare the portrait of a successful ruler with that of a failing one.

The goal of this article is to depict an important episode in a biography of an outstanding Polish poet, a representative of “the generation of Columbuses” – Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński. This episode was the military service of the poet. Baczyński consciously resigned from the Polish studies at the secret Warsaw University and in June of 1943 joined the Assault Groups of the Gray Ranks. He went through all the training stages on the cadet level and took part in assault actions, including detonation of a train transporting German soldiers. On 1st August 1944 he took part in the Warsaw Upraising and on the 4th day of said month he died in the Blank Palace at the Theater Square. The motives of Baczyński’s actions were the family tradition as well as the model of the soldier-poet preserved in the Romantic culture.