The Literary Critic in the Polish People’s Republic

The essay entitled The Literary Critic in the Polish People’s Republic constitutes an attempt to answer the fundamental question: how one is to present and describe today the Polish literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. The essay illustrates that it is worth going beyond the widely accepted view concerning the political and social enslavement of critics and to look at their writings as expressions functioning within an internal system of literary life, accompanied by internal conflicts, myths and hierarchies. For not all of these writings have their origin in the current political system (although they must always refer to the mandatory public discourse). One of the examples of a different than merely a political point of reference here is the moralistic, Catholic self-censorship; another example is the need to define one’s attitude toward the critical-literary tradition, defined above all by such people as Brzozowski and Irzykowski. The acceptance of the inner perspective of a critical expression transfers the whole problem onto the plane of dual reference which is (at all times) a characteristic feature of literary criticism: namely the reference to literature and what is literary and towards “life”, i.e. the sphere of politics, moral choices etc., and to a lack of autonomy as the fundamental issue of the existence of literary criticism.

The essay entitled The Literary Critic in the Polish People’s Republic constitutes an attempt to answer the fundamental question: how one is to present and describe today the Polish literary criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. The essay illustrates that it is worth going beyond the widely accepted view concerning the political and social enslavement of critics and to look at their writings as expressions functioning within an internal system of literary life, accompanied by internal conflicts, myths and hierarchies. For not all of these writings have their origin in the current political system (although they must always refer to the mandatory public discourse). One of the examples of a different than merely a political point of reference here is the moralistic, Catholic self-censorship; another example is the need to define one’s attitude toward the critical-literary tradition, defined above all by such people as Brzozowski and Irzykowski. The acceptance of the inner perspective of a critical expression transfers the whole problem onto the plane of dual reference which is (at all times) a characteristic feature of literary criticism: namely the reference to literature and what is literary and towards “life”, i.e. the sphere of politics, moral choices etc., and to a lack of autonomy as the fundamental issue of the existence of literary criticism.