Theatrical fact
The article is an analysis of Tadeusz Różewicz’s Birth Rate (“the biography of a play”) as an “unhappy” performative act that cannot establish a new paradigm of textual performance (as in Ryszard Nycz’s reading of Różewicz’s text) or epitomize the postmodern breakthrough in the theatre (as in Halina Filipowicz’s interpretation). In this case “unhapinness” refers to the singularity of the catastrophe (inability to write and complete a particular play in a particular moment of history for a particular institutional form of theatre) and to the relationship between the poet and the theatre conditioned by the experience of ressentiment. Such an interpretation requires as a context not the “wholeness” of Różewicz’s literary output but historical and cultural occurrences accompanying the fact of publishing Birth Rate. Różewicz undermines the institution of Polish theatre in the late 60s as a vehicle of collective mourning that enabled the audience to oversee the facts which were uneasy for collective memory and hard to work through.

Paradoxes of idiom
The poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz – a prophecy of its own (and general) incapability and impossibility in the world where ‘poets are dead’ – starts to resemble prose. It is a poetry after the death of poetry, it is written in the world after the death of the world. Różewicz – with all his details, described episodes, references to various “life’s” situations, quotes of factual events – being an angry moralist, at the level of a general diagnosis of reality, seems to be, despite all hesitations, a writer resigned, even a nihilist. The key question of this text is as follows: how it was possible to form own poet’s language, his own idiom, how it was possible within the radical consciousness of the end? The answer: the paradox of Różewicz is constituted on the fact that he has to – in the same moment – construct and to ruin his own poetic singularity. On the one hand, this singularity is to be found among the most important marks that enable us to identify poetry, on the other, its desire transforms the very same singularity into a dwelling of vanity, lightness, triviality, a sick ambition of all writers, a fetish. To be and not to be a poet, that is the Różewicz’s dilemma.

Różewicz. Necrographies
The article deals with the phenomenon of an insistent and recurring interrelation between the living and the dead in Tadeusz Różewicz’s works. This motif – strictly connected with the generational and individual trauma of war experiences – manifests itself not only in the symbolic forms of memoirs and recollections, but also through the visions of physical, all-too-real presence of profaned, unburied dead bodies, taking revenge on the survivor tormented by ambivalent feelings of guilt and shame. All this leads to the emergence of the spectral ‘un-dead’ in Różewicz’s poetry. The analysis of this phantasmatic fi gure in the complementary – anthropological and poetological – perspectives becomes the main subject of the article.

The visual space of postmemory. The poetics of secondary testimony in Tadeusz Różewicz’s nożyk profesora (professor’s little knife)
This essay discusses the problem of postmemory and secondary testimony, including their visual and textual manifestations in Tadeusz Różewicz’s late poem nożyk profesora (2001). The essay deals with theoretical background of the concept of postmemory (according to Marianne Hirsch and Dori Laub) in its psychoanalytical and aesthetical aspects. It focuses on the experimental style and composition of Różewicz’s poem which combines visual (3 photographs) and textual (or, more precise, intertextual) means of expression to articulate a multilayered and polyphonic secondary Holocaust testimony.

To the end of the night. Tadeusz Różewicz’s peeping of the death
In my article I analyse Tadeusz Różewicz’s poems, which reflect the author’s anxiety concerning the upcoming death. Writing about death, the poet reaches for the motif of night and dream. He writes about the dead visiting him and appeals to the Orphean motifs.
I analyse two poetic descriptions in greater detail: *** Przedzierałem się przez ten sen oraz ***wicher dobijał się do okien. The former one is connected with the death of mother. In Różewicz’s poetry the death of mother becomes an obsessive image which foreshadows his own death, a place of experiencing the limit of poetry itself. The latter is an evidence of the old poet’s fear of death. Death in Różewicz’s works is refl ected both as a horizon of life, and of poetry. A poem understood as the “preview of death” is a neverending effort made in the name of life

Dangers of salvation
This review of Sprawiedliwość na końcu języka. Czytanie Waltera Benjamina by Adam Lipszyc locates the book in the framework of a wider phenomenon of interest in Walter Benjamin’s writings in contemporary Polish humanities. Author of the review indicates the basic assumption of homogeneity of the Benjamin’s writings, involving continuous elaboration of the “justice act” formula. The resulting preference for theological perspective, which becomes axiological frame for the analysis contained in the book, is questionable to reviewer. Despite these methodological concerns, the review underlines the impressive character of the analyzes conducted by Lipszyc, including not only a detailed reconstruction of Benjamin’s thought, but also the broader context of the philosophy of the twentieth century. The most important idea for literary studies turns out to be a dialectical relationship between philosophy and literature (criticism, history, translatology), which is being introduced by Lipszyc following Benjamin’s work.

The most original book on Schulz written so far
The paper is a review of Michał Paweł Markowski’s book Powszechna rozwiązłość (Universal promiscuity) devoted to the work of Bruno Schulz. The author acknowledges that certain elements of Markowski’s reading – such as pointing to the links between Schulz and German Romanticism – are of undeniable value. However, the main line of the reading which sets Schulz’s work against the background of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s philosophy is criticized as shallow and inconsistent. Moreover, whereas the author agrees with Markowski’s criticism of Władysław Panas’s all too theological reading of Schulz, he also tries to show that a more subtle interpretation of Schulz’s work in messianic terms does more justice to it than the one offered by Markowski.

No end to weird narratives
In his polemic with the author of ‘Powszechna rozwiązłość: Schulz, egzystencja, literatura’, Adam Lipszyc defended a messianic interpretation of Schulz’s work, rejected by Markowski wholesale as based on insufficient textual evidence. According to Markowski all attempts at in scribing Schulz in the messianic tradition, no matter how defined, must fail because they do not acknowledge a parodic and ironic dimension of Schulz’s worldview, which ruins any serious access to religious thinking of which messianism is a clear example

My Marvellings
Moje zdziwienia/My Marvellings/ is a column run by Henryk Markiewicz, retired Professor of the Jagiellonian University and one of the most outstanding Polish literary historians and theoreticians. In his essays, Professor Markiewicz presents and discusses various literary theory publications, comments on current events at the academia, argues with and questions authors of scholarly and popular articles, all the time being indefatigable in his insistence on respecting standards of academic professionalism, competence, honesty and responsibility for judgments and opinions expressed. This time Henryk Markiewicz focuses his critical attention on Alina Nowicka-Jeżowa’s article Polish humanities traditions: burden or opportunity? Studies on Polish literature, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s essay on Adam Mickiewicz (Mickiewicz in the wonderland), and Krzysztof Stępnik’s book on Józef Ignacy Kraszewski.