List jako medium autobiografii. Przypadek Kota Jeleńskiego

Abstract

Letters, a work included in Ajol, Stanisław Czycz’s debut volume of prose (1967), was created based on his authentic correspondence with a young poet, Barbara Sadowska – without her consent or even knowledge. The questions that are posed involve both the ethics of the writer’s act and the poetics of the work, the main principle of which is the change in the roles of epistolarians that is taking place along with the arrival of letters and, as a consequence, increasing the communication distance and alienation. The effect of the communicative/epistolographic failure achieved in Letters is discussed in the context of Czycz’s epistolographic practices, his reflections on the ontology of literature and on the character of literary communication, as well as of the writer’s acts of staging himself in two roles at the same time: a cynical fraud and a kynical parrhesiast.