This article deals with the motif of “anabasis” in the poetry of Saint-John Perse and the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The former, a poet and diplomat, gave this title to a poem written in the early ...1920s, before he stepped onto the stage of international politics of the interwar period. It, in a way, anticipates his professional and existential choices. Herbert’s “Anabasis” appeared in 1983 in his collection of poems entitled Raport z oblężonego miasta Report from a Besieged City. Although two generations and vastly different geopolitical points of origin separate the authors of these poems, both writers left their “small homelands” (Guadeloupe, Lwów), to become witnesses to history filled with socio-political events in the face of which they could not remain neutral. Saint-John Perse began his own poetic “anabasis” in 1940, as an “exile” having escaped to the USA. Zbigniew Herbert published his “Anabasis” in a time when communist Poland would, once again (following the institution of Martial Law in 1981), would confirm his “internal exile.” Personal contexts aside, the “anabases” of Perse and Herbert represent a search for the “right word” which anticipates the script of existence or which is a meditation on exile, expressing through modern poetic means the desire to recover, or constantly (re)construct, their imaginative and spiritual homelands.
This article explores the significance of orientalism as a cultural phenomenon in Polish literature and culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Intervening in a long-standing debate about ...whether orientalism in Poland was an original phenomenon or a 'derivative and imitative' discourse, the article offers close readings of two cultural phenomena that show that the application of such binaries is overly reductive. Rather, orientalist inspirations in Poland were multi-layered: inspiration from western European orientalism mixed with Poland's own historical 'easternness', especially in the heterogeneous contact zone of what is now Ukraine. Analysis of Edward Raczyński's (1786-1845) 1821 account of his journey to Turkey, and of the life and cultural legend of Wacław Seweryn Rzewuski (1784-1831), shows that Ukraine was a site of overlapping orientalist projections in the Polish cultural imagination in the decades following the Partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
This article sheds new light on Konrad Góra’s Nie (2016) in a sound studies’ perspective. It opposes putting the poetic volume as minorities’ voice of representation under the poetry of political ...involvement. Instead of allowing this, it proposes an interpretation of this book through the voice par excellence, which does not subordinate to speech and exists in his bodily, phonic shape. The point of departure is, firstly; a recognition that Niesubsists in intermedia realizations, which emphasize the significance of phonetic voice comprehension, secondly; an underline that starting this poetic volume by JiříKolář’s tale, make possible to perceive this one in the oral context. The proposal for interpretation exposes the new understanding of the notion of involvement in poetry. It means that the involvement is not the representation of the Other but his embodiment as the independent voice in the text.
The article is an analysis of the “Nasza Praca” magazine published by the Main Board of the League of Women as an internal instruction of women’s organizations in this field. In the years 1947–1981, ...the journal was published in the form of a bulletin, the content of which was intended solely for analysis by members of the organization in all branches of the Polish People’s Republic. On the other hand, since 1981, with the breakthrough in the country and the League of Women itself, “Nasza Praca” became an open monthly addressed to all Polish women, including those who are not members of the Women’s League. The following article focuses on the guidelines of the Main Board of the Women’s League for field activists from the early 1980s.
The author of the article shows that Old Polish (present) participles are transitional categories – they combine the syntactic features of an attribute and a predicate. She also tries to answer the ...question of how to recognize their nature. Is one of the functions dominant or are they equal? It is also important to reflect on how the choice of terminology used for syntactic description affects the way of perceiving and interpreting linguistic phenomena. The author considers the functionality of terms which already exist in the research tradition and are designed to name the double function of a participle. She also proposes the term: “predicative attribute” (in Polish: “predykatywny atrybut”) referring to the functional syntax of Stanisław Karolak. She shows that an entire separation, in a syntactic description, of the two syntactic functions performed by a participle, is ahistorical and incorrect as it suggests the existence of something which was unclear and only emerging.
The following article will show social and cultural life on the pages of the weekly Walczymy o Stal We Fight for Steel. Author has analysed the content of the periodical published between 1953–1956 ...and presented examples of the regional press of the Kielce region published at that time. The analysis shows that the main center of cultural life was the Company’s Culture House, which was the central hub of all cultural events. Besides, the Company’s House of Culture, its activities also led institutions such as the Ostrowiec Workers’ House, Factory Club, the Housing Culture Center, libraries and cinemas.
In the 15th century, a commenting formula: jakoby rzekł appeared in Polish as a calque of the Latin: quasi dicat. Its accumulation can be seen in those old Polish apocrypha that are multi-source and ...focused on theology, not just events. The jakoby rzekł formula occurs almost exclusively in dialogue and introduces a paraphrase of the quoted statement of a Biblical character. It serves various purposes: theological exegesis, especially explaining controversial issues and, sometimes, simplifying theological content, making the figure of Jesus more familiar, or changing the emotional attitude of the reader; also, it introduces explanations of foreign terms. The formula: jakoby rzekł became especially popular in the 16th-century religious texts. They include all functions of the formula noticed in the medieval materials. The formula was used in the Polish language until the 19th century.
Miedzianka – a lower Silesian village, earlier: mining town and a leisure-tourist resort, ger. Kupferberg. It is said that it is a ghost-town, which has (almost) disappeared. Some traces, however, ...remained – a church, photography or human memories – both from before World War II, of German citizens and after the world war of Polish inhabitants. All of them are connected by the traumatic experience that combines post-war resettlement and the destruction of the town. The memory of Miedzianka was not destroyed, though, being passed to next generations. One of the voices of this post-memory can be found in the report by Filip Springer, Miedzianka: Story of Disappearing in 2011. This book quickly became recognised ensuing an increasing interest in the town, its history and fate, making new post-memory narrations to appear, which I describe as „post-memory practice”. One of them is Miasto, którego nie było (A City, Which Didn’t Exist). What and how do these books tell us about Miedzianka? In what sense do these alternative but interpenetrating narrations influence the perception of this place, as well as the memory of it? These questions are the basis of the reflections leading to a display of relations between man and his oblivion/memory and the place. The literature, however, or widely art, having the power to preserve memory and therefore to save, allows the showcasing of the transformation of the town: its history, disappearance, and finally transubstantiation into a place of memory, which is created mainly by the second and third generations – heritage depositories.
This article is about the genological aspects of the historical fantasy novels by Teodor Parnicki as seen in his dilogy consisting of Muza dalekich podróży and Staliśmy jak dwa sny. I focus mainly on ...fantasy elements visible in the novels, which are clearly divided into two separated tendencies. I called the first one “historical fantasy”, and the author himself called the second one “pure fantasy”. Their coexistence is what distinguishes Parnicki’s type of novel from similar forms (historical novels, fantasy novels, and alternate history). At the same time, this combination gives the writer’s creations traits characteristic of the romantic period (mise en abyme, romantic irony) and determines the literary character of the text, which is stronger than the historical one.
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