Modernizowanie Wyspiańskiego. Rozmawiają prof. dr hab. Ewa Miodońska, prof. dr hab. Magdalena Popiel, Maria Potocka, prof. dr hab. Maria Prussak, prof. dr hab. Teresa Walas, dr hab. Joanna Walaszek

The article concerns the current situation of the discipline of comparative literature, particularly the question of dialogue/dialogism and comparative literary studies. A general discussion on dialogue and dialogism (with special reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory discussed by Julia Kristeva and also by others such as Paul de Man, Jola Škulj, Michael Holquist) leads to the conclusion that these concepts are crucial to the comparative literature at the time of the “cultural turn”. Finally, the author distinguishes two types of comparative studies: “traditional”comparative literature and “new” comparative literature (cultural comparatism). In the field of “traditional” comparative literature the dialogism is considered as a problem of intertextuality in its most literal sense, whereas in the field of cultural comparatism it is understood as a pragmatically oriented theory of knowledge.

In the paper, the author undertakes an attempt to present the posthumous history of the earthly remains of the author of the Treny (Laments). To our great surprise, we confront here some very concrete questions. To begin with, our doubts arise already in connection with the exact date of the poet’s death; researchers squabble over the place of the poet’s first burial (Lublin? Sycyna or Zwoleń?); the history of the poet’s Zwoleń grave has not been properly researched. In the paper, the author focuses above all, on discussing the issues associated with the events which took place in Zwoleń in the course of the 19th- 20th centuries. Thus, he reminds the readers of the shocking deed of Tadeusz Czacki who in 1791 decided to take out from Kochanowski’s coffin the poet’s skull (up until today, the skull constitutes an exhibit in the Princes’ Czartoryski Museum in Krakow); he also reminds the readers of the equally shocking decision of the Zwoleń parish priest of 1830 to remove Kochanowski’s remains from the crypt under the church and bury them in a communal grave; subsequently, the author describes the symbolic burial of the poet in 1984. In the Aneks (Supplement), the author encloses a letter of pope John Paul II which the pontiff had sent for celebrations in Zwoleń; however, the letter had not been read during the celebrations as it had been delayed in the post, only to be delivered after the celebrations. The original of the letter is to be found in the archives of the Zwoleń parish.

The article constitutes a reflection on non-stereotyped attempts to interpret the myth of Torquato Tasso in the ecphrases of Charles Baudelaire and Cyprian Norwid. The direct source of creative inspiration here proves to be not so much the legend which had grown around the figure of the Italian poet (who is regarded almost as the embodiment of the Romantic visions of the brilliant, but rejected artist, a madman and unhappy lover), but a concrete work of art –namely the painting Le Tasse en prison (Tasso in Prison) by Eugene Delacroix as well as the studies and sketches which accompany it. A comparative analysis of the painting, drawings and Charles Baudelaire’s sonnet On “Tasso in Prison”, an epistolary commentary to Delacroix’painting (letter to Marian Sokołowski from the 9th October 1864) as well as Cyprian Norwid’s lyrical poem Wierny portret (fithful Portrait) allows one to make some worthwhile observations concerning the links between literature and painting, and in particular the Romantic conception of beauty inspired by beauty and generating beauty.

The article constitutes an attempt to present a new interpretation of the works of Rafał Wojaczek and Cyprian Norwid along the plane which is marked out by the inter-textual relations between the writings of the two, it would seem, so radically different poets. In this context, the individual interpretative concepts of the works of the author of Sezon (High Season), grow out of the alternative thinking (to the continually influential “mythical” concepts) about the work of the author of Sezon, which is perceived as a cohesive and consistently developed poetic project, comprising the entirety of his poetic achievements. The key motif of the article is the attitude of both poets to the literary tradition, or else, to use the language of Harold Bloom, who serves as the model for various interpretative solutions adopted by the author of the article, reflection on the issue of priority and the struggle for the autonomy and purity of the poetic expression. The article constitutes a part of a more extensive dissertation devoted to the issue of the inter-textual relation between the works of both poets, entitled The Traces of Presence. On the Inter-Textual Presence of Norwid in the Literary Works of Rafał Wojaczek.

The goal of the article is to highlight the links between Tadeusz Nowak’s novel A jak królem, a jak katem będziesz (When You Are a King, When You Are a Hangman), with the trend known as magical realism. Pointing out to the connections with this trend, which is very much alive in the contemporary world literature, allows one to survey the writings of the Polish author from a new, broader perspective. One is able to perceive the whole richness of the author’s prose, where realism and the miraculous seem to grow out of reality and are equivalent to one another. The elements of magical realism distinguished by the authoress (the element of magic in the realistically constructed depicted world, the permeation of two worlds and two separate realities, the reflection of the magical mentality etc.) are also present in Nowak’s other works, and particularly in his short-stories dating back to different periods, such as Przebudzenia (Awakenings), W puchu alleluja, In the fluff of the hallelujah? or Półbaśnie (Half-Fairy Tales).

The subject of the present article is an attempt to interpret Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel entitled Dojczland (Deutschland - Germany) as a book which, on the one hand, seems to be typical of the writer as it continues the poetics of travel style writing, whose best realizations are Stasiuk’s essay Dziennik okrętowy (Ship’s Log) and novels: Jadąc do Babadag (On the Way to Babadag) and Fado, and on the other hand, as a work which undermines this very poetic. For in Dojczland we are dealing with the deconstruction of the very concept of writing about travel – if one assumes that such features, preserved in the tradition of the genre as experiencing, witnessing aiming at trans-cultural communication, fascination with the exoticism of the different and the alien are indeed distinctive of it. In the case of Stasiuk’s novel, the situation is quite different: his description of Germany, as it looms to us from the pages of Dojczland, is in fact a documentation of a certain cognitive and esthetic fiasco. The German travels of the author of Opowieści galicyjskie (Galician Tales) are in reality nothing more than a tautological enumeration of the fantasies associated with the German reality, of successive derivatives of what had already been experienced – in reality presenting the German otherness as its petrified mental picture and by comparing what is different with what is already known, it transforms the exotic into the experience of boredom. The hypothesis with which the author ends his article is the enunciation that maybe it is precisely in this way that Stasiuk carries out a symbolic act of resentful violation of the colonizing discourse of the Western civilization which seems to dominate the Central-European identity.

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.

In her article, the author discusses the problems of readership and book advertising in the 18th century, both of which issues have been relatively little investigated so far. The article constitutes an attempt to present a sociological classification of readership groups, on the basis of the located sources: press announcements, leaflets and lists of subscribers. An analysis of the inventory of works appearing in the form of subscriptions allows one to draw certain hypotheses concerning the popularity of the individual titles. The applied division into religious, political-legal and informative books, as well as literature and scientific publications, allows one to take a closer look at the various groups of readers, also taking into account the interests in various types of writing.