The Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig (1928–2011) defines her own process of literary creation in interart terms as a translation of pictures into verbal signs. She often comments on the intersemiotic difficulties involved in this transformation by referring to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy. Using Trotzig’s notion of the iconoclastic controversy as a starting point, the present article investigates her understanding of the picture-word-transformation problems. The line of argument comprises five stages. In the first stage, the main issue of the article is presented and specified. In the second stage, it is argued that previous critical approaches to Trotzig’s Byzantinism in most cases have been based on misleadingly anachronistic and mainly Occidental categories. In the third stage, the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy is related to the distinctive character of the theological thought of the Eastern Church. In the fourth stage, the Byzantine iconophile and iconoclast theories are applied to Trotzig’s literary works. A close reading of a representative prose poem of hers, “Teologiska variationer” (“Theological vari­ations”), demonstrates that her works unequivocally support the icon theology of the iconodules. In the closing fifth stage, Trotzig’s notion of the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy is reconstructed on the basis of her essays and interviews in which she explains her own as well as other authors’ intersemiotic difficulties. In conclusion, these difficulties are related to general aesthetic, political, ideological and philophical conflicts, all of which are – paradoxically – diagnosed by Trotzig herself in typical categories of Western theology.

The phenomenology of love, as developed by Jean-Luc Marion in his work Le Phénomène érotique (2003), is related to the concept of gift-giving, whose model is outlined in Étant donné and Réduction et donation. The act of receiving a gift (any kind of gift) is present in philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger. J.-L. Marion’s new “erotic reduction”, radicalised through a phenomenological reduction, targets man as a human being and his ability to love. Thus, the author of Phénomène érotique defines the concept of the amorous phenomenon in a clear and rigorous way, moving towards the notions developed in his work Prolégomènes à la charité. The objective is to consider and, ultimately, to condemn the essential attribute of mankind, the cogito, since the ego is, above all, a person who loves, appearing as a freestanding category that stands beyond the features of a purely rational being, in the Cartesian sense.
Behind Marion’s position emerges a heideggerian critique of Dasein that is not only a negation, but also a constructive elaboration of the ego amans (the lover, the amorous phenomenon), as well as a theological dimension of an iconic image that surpasses us, of the authenticity of human relationships, and of real love (for example, of God). Thus, we are at the intersection of phenomenology and theology. 

Crime fiction written in Urdu language is an example of an extraordinary literary phenomenon. Books written in that genre are extremely popular amongst the readers in both India and Pakistan. Yet, in those countries novels by prolific crime fiction writers are not even included on best-seller lists, even though their selling reaches thousands of copies. Moreover, crime fiction is absent from works of literary critics and scholars dealing with vernacular writing of India and Pakistan.
The main aim of this article is to present the crime scene of Urdu literature through the profile of Ibne Safi – the most interesting writer of this genre. The text focuses on the style of the author and inspirations that have shaped his writing. Arguments are based on excerpts from his novels that have not been translated into Polish before.

The aim of the study is to show and analyse the phases and forms of enforcing/functioning of socialist realism as a dominant political and aesthetic doctrine and an institutionalised system in the literature of Bulgaria. Justification is provided for the use of concepts and historical--theoretical constructs, such as “socialist realism,” “domestication of socialist realism” etc., which make possible the emergence of a new history of literature from the times of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria.
The chronicles of Bulgarian socialist realism between 1948 and 1956 describe a few characteristics of the “method” in the context of the totalitarian People’s Republic, which are a direct repercussion of the practices of sovietisation applied with slight Bulgarian adaptations. The domestication of socialist realism – increasingly noticeable after 1956 – presents a limitation to the allowed freedoms of writing and publishing through authoritative discourses, accompanied by procedures which shorten the distance between the different positions in the literary field. The Bulgarian experience of socialist realist literary production brings into relief a specific model, that warrants the definition home-made socialist realism.

 

Kriváň (2494 m), a peak in the High Tatras, is not only one of the most beautiful peaks in the whole Carpathians but also is widely considered to be a national mountain of Slovakia, appearing even on Slovakia’s euro coins. This paper shows cultural background of how the mountain became a symbol connected with slovak national identity, starting in mid 19. Century’s “­national rebirth”. It also describes “slovak national pilgrimages” to the top of Kriváň and the history of monuments on the top of the mountain, showing it as a space of cultural struggle between slovak nationalists and hungarian state.

Several of Graham Swift’s novels are permeated with the sense of an ending and eschatological reflections. The characters’ vision of their lives tends to be underpinned by a notion of decline. While the experience of loss and the confrontation with mortality depicted in Swift’s fiction have been extensively analysed, less attention has been paid to the fact that in perceiving their lives as a process of deterioration, the characters implicitly acknowledge the existence of an initial stage of happiness against which this process may be measured. This paper will identify and examine the infrequent yet meaningful intimations of primal harmony and happiness, which sometimes take on quasi-religious overtones, reminiscent of the concept of paradise.
 

The topic of this article is the role of the Polish press in disseminating knowledge about Italian Futurism in the years 1909–1939. It is the press, both daily and more or less specialized periodicals on culture, that is the most important and unrivalled source of information on the Italian avant-garde in Poland. The collected bibliography, on which the present text is based, contains one hundred sixty-five references. The published materials can be divided into several groups: critical sketches, articles and all kinds of informative notes by Polish authors on Futurism, translations of Futurist theoretical texts, poetry and theatre, as well as reproductions of works of art, photographs and drawings portraying Futurists. From the beginning, the press commentators devoted most of their attention to the figure and activities of Marinetti. In the ’30s, the interest in Futurism was effectively fuelled by his visit to Poland in relation to the staging of his drama Prisoners in the theatre in Lviv. Painting and theatrical experiments (mainly by Prampolini) also compose a large bibliography. Besides, Futurist literary manifestos influenced the new Polish poetry, creating hot press polemics, and the language of media itself. In addition to aesthetic issues, attention was drawn to Futurist proposals to rebuild social relations and to the link between Futurism and Fascism. Among the most important promoters of the Italian movement we list two poets, Peiper and Kurek, as well as writers and translators Kołtoński and Boyé, while the most well-deserved press titles are “Wiadomości Literackie” (Literary News) and “Zwrotnica” (Switches).
 

The aim of the article is to research into narrative structures in Sara Lidman‘s report Gruva. Gruva is one of the best examples of the 1960s Swedish literature which is characterized by political immersion. The report aims at the mimetic directness, still, there are many strategies which create this report‘s literariness. Gruva was analized from different perspectives, but in contrast to other researchers the author chooses narrative structures in the report as her object of study. The author considers to what extent the narrative structures build the report‘s literariness or, in contrary, its simplicity. Moreover, the important part of the article is to verify which tendency is predominant. The analysis is based on the structural model of the narrative theorist Gérard Genette. This model is supplemented by other theoreticians notions.

In this paper comparative analysis of poetic works of Zbigniew Herbert and Miodrag Pavlović concerning the duality between culture and barbarism is being presented. The opposition between these two categories is present in both author’s poetry but they use it in slightly different ways. In Herbert’s poetry, as interpreted by Stanisław Barańczak, there is a relation between “heritage” and “disinheritance” that appears on various levels: geographic, historic and cognitive. The lyrical subject of the poems gets a feeling of an internal conflict, as he feels both connected to the world of European culture and separated from it, partly because of the war and totalitarian experience of the 20th century. In the poetry of Miodrag Pavlović there is a confrontation between the pagan, nature-bonded Slavs and the Greek, Christian culture of Byzantium. The two worlds are the roots the poet reaches to in search of the true nature of ‘Balkan people’. For both poets the duality of culture and barbarism can be considered a symbol of internal tension that characterises a human being who belongs to the two worlds and lives between them.