The paper, being a postscript to the book "Miejsca Leśmiana. Topika recepcji krytycznoliterackiej" (Leśmian’s places. The topos of critical reception) (2011), outlines the history of literary ...criticism reception of Bolesław Leśmian’s output from the first years of the 21st century to the jubilee year 2017. Not only did the accelerated reception visible already in the early 1990s continue to gain momentum but it even got stronger in the analyzed period. Critics are bolder and bolder in speaking of Leśmian as a precursor of the 20th century modernism and postmodernism; “(post) modernizations” of Leśmian are accompanied, in turn, by changes on the level of language (even though some of them are rather superficial). Despite the discontinuity highlighted by critics, this “return to Leśmian”, which has lasted for over two decades, is to a large extent a come-back to approaches and threads of earlier reception. There are, however, significant shifts, e.g. in the uses of the topos of Leśmian’s Jewish/Polish identity. Totally new phenomena, in contrast, include politicization of the discourse about the poet.
This publication, the third volume of the Calendar of Cultural Life in Lodz between 1945 and 1946 ("Kalendarium łódzkiego życia kulturalnego w latach 1945–1946"), focuses on the second half of April ...1945, when cultural life was reorganised after more than five years of German occupation and terror. Spring 1945 was a peculiar period in the history of Lodz: in the face of the virtually complete annihilation of Warsaw, Lodz became the home of some of the Communist offices and was visited by prominent representatives of both intellectual and cultural life. They were offered apartments and jobs in the state-controlled press and hastily established cultural institutions and universities. Through a detailed denotation of facts related to history, politics as well as intellectual and artistic life, the author of the text makes an attempt to present the mechanisms and the dynamics of the earliest stage of the cultural and ideological revolution implemented in Poland between 1945 and 1948.
Auto/bio/geo/graphics forms a creative and original interpretive lens of the author of the book, which looks at individual volumes, poems and texts about art by Julia Hartwig. Space assigned to the ...eponymous center, province and backstreets becomes the compositional frame, allowing for a smooth narration. These spatial references function as the compositional key of the book divided into three segments: "France - a nostalgic center, America - the everyday life province" and "Poland – backstreets of history and memory", in which, in specific examples of works, each time a space and its transformations are accounted for.
Dar przyjaźni. Dar opowieści. „Dwaj Macieje Szczukowski, Dariusz
Czytanie literatury : czasopismo Instytutu Filologii Polskiej Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego,
2018
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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The paper is an attempt to interpret "Dwaj Macieje" (Two Maciejs), a poem by Bolesław Leśmian in the context of the poet’s autobiographical experience, namely his friendship with Franz Fischer. In ...the proposed interpretation Leśmian’s work is a testimony of the faith in the gift of friendship and the gift of story.
Transgression engages psychosomatically: the corporeal experience of pain and pleasure provoked by self-preservation constraints paves the way for experiences detached from the senses and reason. ...Violation of barriers violates the man; beyond that lays the impossible, which in the well-known Leśmian’s ballad "Piła" is transposed as disintegration and dispersion of the body experiencing cruel delight. The article is an attempt at refreshed reading of this ballad; it suggests taking into account a sadistic context which is considered atypical of research into Leśmian. In this poem the inspiration of folk beliefs permeates with the modernist experience of the revolution. The similarity of carnal intercourse to a scene of spectacular torture makes it possible to treat this ballad as an important voice in the issue of distinction between sexuality aimed at progeny, and eroticism leading to barren and unuseful pleasure. The paper focuses on the characteristics of libertine features of Leśmian’s poetics, the indication of potential sources of the woman-saw image, the importance of exclamations of ballad lovers, the issue of rhythm and the symbolism of fragmented body.
Czym są „Kwiaty polskie” Tuwima? Ratajska, Krystyna
Czytanie literatury : czasopismo Instytutu Filologii Polskiej Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego,
2018
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The text is a record of the last public appearance of Prof. Krystyna Ratajska Ph.D. (1938–2017) devoted to "Kwiaty polskie" (Polish Flowers) presented o n 13 September in Dom Literatury in Lodz ...during a discussion panel being a fragment of the event "Urodziny Juliana Tuwima 2017" (Julian Tuwim’s Birthday 2017). The introduction to the lecture recalls the circumstances of the origin and issue of genre affiliation of "Kwiaty Polskie". Tuwim’s utterances from his correspondence lead to observations concerning the formal innovative character of the poem in question. "Kwiaty Polskie" may be called a “colourful kaleidoscope”, a catch-all form representing new quality which allows for different genres and ways of speaking about the world. This is a poem which may contain different qualities and stylistic tones. Composing this poem by the poet may be also compared to creating a bunch of flowers, assembling a colourful whole from fragments diversified with regard to the genre, which makes it a syncretic work, a literary hybrid. Tuwim’s "Kwiaty polskie" is also a “biographical reading” composed of different fragments whose unchronological, associative order is governed by memory. The author of the lecture also recalls the relations of Ignacy Dziewierski, the poem’s main protagonist, with Tuwim. Like the poet himself he is a talented artist dealing with art of different kinds (both high and low). He may be also perceived as his spiritual portrait seeking consolation and escape from fear, emptiness and death in his art. According to the author, "Kwiaty Polskie" is, all in all, a work born out of Tuwim’s micrological passion and his attention to detail, depicting the world in the creation of which sensory elements, particles, pieces and traces become the building material.
The paper is aimed at tracing the motif of the poet’s failure in the context of the poetological project, articulated most vividly by Bolesław Leśmian in his literary essays, but also developed in ...numerous poems with auto-thematic threads. The author proposes a peripheral perspective, placing in the centre of his deliberations the most ill-fated poet from the gallery of artists evoked by Leśmian, Sinbad’s uncle Tarabuk from "Przygody Sindbada Żeglarza" (The Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor) (1913). Even though this early literary fable tends to be treated as a marginal text in the poet’s literary output, it does contain in its core many elements which are important for his literary views. One of them is, for instance, the vision of a poet who strives to translate the rhythm of nature translate into the rhythm of his melodious verse, yet continues to experience failures of different types: the fruits of his labour undergo destruction, and subsequent methods of preserving poetry distort the author’s original intention. The paper contains elements of polemics with the essay entitled "Wuj Tarabuk i nędza pisania" (Uncle Tarabuk and the misery of writing) by Ryszard Koziołek.
In her early short story entitled "Ultimus" Konopnicka accomplished the concept of Falkentheorie by Paul Heyse in an original way, using the motif of a crane as the thematic and composition keystone. ...Inspired to a large extent by Orzeszkowa’s "Romanowa", Konopnicka writes about moral depravation of a young nobleman, using parallelism: man-animal in two orders – naturalistic and symbolic. The empathic reception of the text diverging from previous interpretations allows to place "Ultimus" among texts which stand up for miserables personas.
The essay "Impossible nature? Ecopoetic traces in Leśmian’s verdure" is both a proposal and an attempt to interpret the literary output of the author of Dziejba leśna (Forest Happenings) from the ...ecopoetic perspective. Lyrical ways of presenting nature are subject to interpretation, accounting for their metonymic character (verdure) and entanglement in the process of shaping the poetic language. The natural universe outlined by Leśmian is connected with the approval of diversity, complexity and elusiveness of nature in the process of cognition. At the same time nature becomes endowed with cognitive potential when combined with the substance of words. Leśmian’s poems seem to form not so much a coherent ecopoetic project as manifest certain ecopoetic intuition.
Bolesław Leśmian’s poem *** Z dłońmi tak splecionymi, jakbyś klęcząc, spała… (With your hands clasped as if you slept kneeling) is analyzed with regard to the categories of carnality and ...representation, paying attention to the issue of rhythm. The author examines “significance”, traces the occurrence of transversal reflections and researches the logical and rhetorical structure which reveals its dynamic character and spatiality in the form of DNA chain links. The interpretation of the phonological layer of the text brings to mind somatic experiencing of reading the lyric poem, and consequently the way in which Leśmian’s the subject establishes contact with the reader.
