Modern Polish Literature Research Articles

David A. Frick (1955–2022) i jego badania staropolskie

The paper is devoted to David Allan Frick, an American scholar, translator, and professor at the University of Berkeley. The author briefly presents the biography of Frick and analyses his books, focusing on Frick’s research on early modern Polish literature and culture.

Olanda

Olanda

Juliusz Słowacki in the Holy Land in 1837

ABSTRACT The Polish poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849) travelled through Palestine between 2 January and 27 January 1837, from El-Arish on the southern border with Egypt, at that time quarantined owing to plague, to the area around Lake Tiberias in the north, which had just been devastated by a strong earthquake. A detailed analysis of the itinerary of this pilgrimage has made it possible to establish new circumstances and topographical facts. The poet’s recently discovered personal diary (Raptularz Wschodni) contains hitherto unknown observations and drawings by the author himself. Together with his other travel notes and recollections in his letters, they constitute an invaluable basis for a new account of how and where he wandered, and where he stayed and spent the night. The published accounts of other 19th-century travellers in Palestine have helped establish further details: three Polish Roman Catholic priests, two French intellectuals, and the English aristocrat and globetrotter G. Robinson, as well as site views by D. Roberts. The traditional and often erroneous identification and dating of the sites visited by Słowacki have been verified on the basis of scientific historical and archaeological research as well as the author's own observations in situ in Israel and her interviews with Franciscan archivists. As far as the extensive modern Polish literature on this journey concerns, the novelty here lies in identifying features in three of Slowacki’s drawings and determining the places where the poet stayed in the Franciscan hospices in Ramla, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth.

Contributors

Contributors

The category of aspect and numbers as determinants of verb nature of the hybrid verb forms (based on verbal nouns in Polish and Ukrainian)

The article deals with different approaches to identify the notions of verbal nouns. The main attention is given to the terms for the nomination of the verbal nouns and their classification. Verbal nouns are a clear example of hybridity as they combine categories typical for different classes of words. The verb nature of these formation is proved by the grammatical categories of aspect and number. Thus, two types of verb nouns are distinguished: predicate nouns, which are used only in the singular and imitate aspectual semantics, and subject nouns, which accordingly lose their aspect and can be used in the plural, they are divided into several semantic subtypes: terms, mode of action, condition, etc. The results of this comparison with examples from the modern Ukrainian and Polish literature are presented in the article, in particular regarding new formed examples, which are used in the Internet space.

Zbigniew Herberts Beziehungen zu Österreich

The volume Zbigniew Herbert und Österreich, edited by Przemysław Chojnowski, discussed and reviewed here, comprises articles by the well-known Herbert researchers that shed light on different aspects of Herbert’s connections to Austria, both to his Austrian friends and representatives of the Austrian literary scene. In addition, some previously unpublished translations of poems by the Polish poet are presented as well as a detailed list of his visits to Austria. In the appendix a rich documentary material has been added, mostly containing unpublished photographs and drawings by Herbert, were made during his visits to Vienna and the Salzkammergut. The reviews and evaluation of the Austrian literary critique complete the volume. Austria plays an important part in Herbert’s international breakthrough as a writer. The poet’s existing and emerging relationships with Austria are documented in detail and comprehensively, which makes the book essential for the reader interested in Herbert in particular or in the modern Polish literature in general.

The gardener’s topos based on the example of the poem “The Gardener” (Ogrodnik) by Czesław Miłosz (text analysis)

„The gardener’s topos based on the example of the poem Ogrodnik by Czesław Miłosz (text analysis)”. The article is a detailed consideration of a poem by Czesław Miłosz entitled Ogrodnik [Gardener]. The main object of the hermeneutic and structural analysis of this poem is the “topos of the gardener”. The analysis is meant to characterize the topos of the gardener and point to the role of a modern poet and modern Polish literature.

Background. The diverse experience of artistic culture, refl ected in the established system of genres, appears in a new light from the standpoint of modernity as experts

Background. The diverse experience of artistic culture, refl ected in the established system of genres, appears in a new light from the standpoint of modernity as experts

Agnieszka Dauksza, Affective Modernism. Modern Polish literature in a relational interpretation

Agnieszka Dauksza, Affective Modernism. Modern Polish literature in a relational interpretation

Modern Polonya romanında yabancı(laşmış) bir kadın

Maria Kuncewiczowa has gained an important place among modern Polish literature novelists with her psychological novel entitled Cudzoziemka (The Stranger Woman). The novel, which based on the theme of alienation, one of the popular concepts of the twentieth century, reects the psychological changes, caused by the experience of the focus gure, Roza Żabczynska. Roza Żabczynska is an unhappy woman who feels strange even beside her family, can not reconile with today and therefore always runs away to past. Her big love whom she left behind, incompleted music career and unfullled dreams capture her in a great sense of strangeness which starts from Russia and extends to Poland. In her work which is an example of psychological novel, the author frequently uses the technique of stream of consciousness and internal monologues. While creating a bi-directional time stream to go away from the chronological time sequence, at the same time she gets the reader follow the events through the mind of the focus gure. She expands her psychological work with the perspectives of Roza's lineage, social position, traditions and customs. By this way, she discusses the focus gure at many levels and in a three-dimensional reality. In this study, the focus gure of the novel entitled The Stranger Woman will be analyzed on the axis of estrangement concept.

Cultural Asymmetry as a Problem in the Dutch-language Translations of Popiół i diament, Mała apokalipsa and Dukla

AbstractCulture is present in texts created in a certain literary system and socio-cultural context on every level and becomes particularly visible in culture-specific items (CSIs). They anchor the texts into a certain culture and as such pose serious translation problems. At the same time culture is embedded in the system of transnational relations where there is always cultural asymmetry that exerts influence on the translation process. The position of the culture and the language in the international system tends to be reflected in translator’s choices. This paper addresses the issue of the cultural asymmetry and culturebound translation problems in the Dutch translations of modern Polish literature. For this purpose the author takes a close look at the translations of Popioł i diament [Ashes and Diamonds], Mała apokalipsa [A minor apocalypse] and Dukla [Dukla].

ESĖ ŽANRAS KAIP ATSAKAS Į ŠIUOLAIKINIO SKAITYTOJO POREIKIUS

The article reviews the popularity of essay genre in modern Lithuanian and Polish literature. It tries to answer the question of what essay’s features determine its success, and what is so special about this genre that the most important authors have chosen essay as the most appropriate form to express their creative ideas. Essay’s popularity in Lithuania and Poland at the end of XX, and in the beginning of XXI century is mainly connected with the political and social situation changes, but – even though the breakthrough of this literary form had its place more than twenty years ago – the interest in it is not decreasing. What could be the reason for this situation? Which elements of modern culture create such favorable conditions for essay’s development? We could look for the answer to this question while reflecting on the change of communication methods, on which the new media has a huge impact. The new media and its tools change the ways of communication, and reading habits. The essay genre – with its openness, freedom, flexibility and compactness – is the literary form that can meet the modern communication structure the most adequately.

Trans/figuracje nowoczesności? Spory o twórczość Marii Komornickiej-Piotra Odmieńca Własta

The article is a reflection of how the work by Maria Komornicka (pen name Piotr Odmieniec Wlast) was perceived in the past two decades on the basis of an analysis of a monograph by Edward Boniecki (1996), Izabela Filipiak (2006) and Brigitta Helbig-Mischewski (2010) in the context of changes in the interpretation of modern Polish literature. In the article, attention is drawn to three groups of issues which can only be identified on the basis of contemporary perception, incomplete as it is, due to the fact that all the works of Komornicka have not been published. The forms and meaning of broadly defined autobiographical writing has been re-defined, while Polish and regional literary modernism has been revised together with the involvement of literary researchers in the subject of their analyses. The author of the article suggests a schematic differentiation between updating, prospective and retrospective strategies in Komornicka’s work and a reflection on the indirect involvement in social and cultural discourses and discussions developed by contemporary researchers into Komornicka’s work.

How Can One Write National Literature History in a “Glocal” World? Remarks on the Writing of a Modern Polish Literature Handbook in English

In this article I should like to explain how I plan to work on a one-volume English-language history of Polish literature that is supposed to address both foreign and Polish readers. While foreign readers should acquire some perspective on one of the relatively unknown European literatures, domestic readers should be helped to see their well-known literature from different cultural angles. I will discuss several issues connected with the writing of such a handbook, namely: existing ways of presenting Polish literature internationally, the inner mechanisms and the outer relationships of Polish literature, its local and global aspects (also in the case of immigrant literature), the increasing importance of discussing intertextuality and intermediality of the literature as well as new forms of hybridisation of literary language. My article is meant to illustrate and discuss some problems of presenting a “local” literature on the global literary-history market today.

Souvenir – avenir.Die Mehrsprachigkeit des Romans von A. Kuśniewicz.Lektion in einer toten Sprache

This study deals with the work The Hour of a Dead Language, a novel of an important figure of modern Polish literature, A. Kuśniewicz. The story is set on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the last year of World War I. The protagonist, Kiekeritz, who suffers from a lung disease, collects the fragmented object memories of the past in the hope of reconstructing it by building up a coherent story after returning home. The plot signifies the intertwining of microhistory and macrohistory. The death of the officer and the dissolution of the Monarchy run on parallel courses: the past cannot be brought to the present, it remains fragmental. After having looked for the language of the present in vain, the officer realises the universal decay. The language of the officer and that of the Monarchy parish, which is also shown by the allegory of nature, are perceived in the novel.

Three Versions of Modernity: Witkacy, Schulz, Gombrowicz

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy (1885–1939), Bruno Schulz (1892 –1942), and Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) were all born during the time of the Partition of Poland: Witkacy and Gombrowicz in the Russian Partition, and Schulz in the Austro-Hungarian one. The Polish literature with which they came in contact in childhood and youth still had as its chief function to provide Poles with uplift and to waken hope that independence would be returned to the fatherland. In truth, no one knew how this was supposed to happen (Poland was divided among the three greatest military powers in Europe), but a belief in the recovery of self-determination was somehow maintained in Polish lands. But in 1918, when those dreams came true, Polish literature was not prepared. It was necessary to invent it anew, to find new subjects that would be suitable for a society entering into independence (a short-lived one, unfortunately, only lasting twenty years), but also to face up to problems that modernity had brought to the whole world. The three writers mentioned above, at first less appreciated than those who were engaged in social matters and who were nationalist writers, such as Andrzej Strug, Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski, Zofi a Nałkowska, and Maria Dąbrowska, won recognition after the Second World War and became Polish “classics of modernity”. This does not alter the fact that each of them saw modernity differently, and, as a result, solved the problems of literary form differently from his colleagues. At the start of the 1960s, Gombrowicz defi ned the difference among them – the “three musketeers” of modern Polish literature.

Staropolskie ciało, jakie było, każdy przeczyta

The 9th issue of the magazine published by the Faculty of Languages, Nicolaus Copernicus University, i.e. “Litteraria Copernicana” is the subject of this review. The issue is entitled “The body in early modern Polish literature”. The informative value of this magazine mostly lies in the fact that early modern Polish literature has begun to be read in a manner that is characteristic of the contemporary humanities which are concerned with this peculiar topic of studies, i.e. the body.

Glosa do nienapisanej Historii Nowoczesnej Literatury Polskiej Aleksandra Wata

Commentary on the unwritten history of modern Polish literature of Aleksander Wat The starting point for further consideration is for the author the intriguing convergence between the modern division of twentieth-century literature, proposed by Michał Paweł Markowski (for the “conservative” and “critical” modernism), and related to the same topic more than half century earlier Wat’s intuitions. In his Dziennik bez samogłosek [Diary without Vowels] (from January 1964) arguing with Milosz (who once teased Wat with a careless treatment of his work JA z jednej strony i JA z drugiej strony mego mopsożelaznego piecyka [Me from One Side and Me from the Other Side of My Pug Iron Stove]) draws an original story of Polish literature. Among important to Wat’s number of authors like Witkacy, Leśmian, Białoszewski and Różewicz, the author focuses on the last two, explaining why they occupy such a high place in Wat’s hierarchy. “Baka’s child” Białoszewski is dear to Wat because of the discoveries in the language area, and Różewicz on the other hand, although his presence in this statement may appear surprising, is for Wat a successor to the “full” stylistic secession. Another of the interesting to Wat writers – Gombrowicz, awakens in him ambivalent feelings from unrelenting criticism of a fellow writer (“complete ignorance”), to admiration of the Kosmos [Cosmos] (“Kosmos is a great book”).

Prawda marginesu (notatki z lektury)

The essay presents remarks about the category of “the margin” in modern Polish literature, and also an interpretation of Zbigniew Kopeć’s book, Niepokorni. Brudni. Źli. Ludzie marginesu w prozie polskiej XX wieku [The Angry, The Dirty, The Bad: People of the Margin in Polish Fic­tion of the 20th Century]. The truth of the margin emerges from an en­counter with sheer existence, with life on the bottom, in places marked by suffering and evil, places that are sick, pathological, revulsive, and consequently abandoned by the better-off part of the society. A lit erature that approaches such places attempts to be a quest for pure and simple truth that is touching and deeply human. Kopeć’s and the present author’s remarks, presented in the article, are dedicated to such attempth made by Polish fiction writers of the 20th century.

Tradition och provokation. Kvinnlighetens röst i modern polsk litteratur

There is a basic understanding of attitude towards women's themes in Polish literature and culture that derives from a traditional view on the roles of men and women. Especially the idea that womanliness is inborn and that the main purpose of a woman is to be a wife and mother, is today characteristic of women's role and position in Poland. This position is of course strongly influenced by the religious codes in Polish society. Here the strong reverence for the Virgin Mary Mother of God assumes a special position as one of the most distinctive national symbols. It is against this background of historical, cultural and religious expectations that one must see the picture of women in Polish literature, both earlier and today. This picture, however, has been noticeably affected by the political and social events of recent decades both in Poland and in all of Eastern and Central Europé. Even the picture of women in modern Polish literature is in the process of redefining itself. Especially the picture of women that is put forward by young women writers such as Izabela Filipiak, Manuella Gretkowska, Olga Tokarczuk and others, hardly has any counterpart, seen from a traditional point of view, in earlier Polish literary history. In the artide I take up and exemplify some of the most characteristic aspects of these writers' novels, with an emphasis on the discrepancy between old expectations and new roles for women and "womanliness" in modern Polish literature.