The Bewitched Princess. Maria Dabrowska's social commentaries at their sources

• Authors: Borkowska G.
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

This article discusses early commentaries by Maria Dabrowska, dating 1912-1914. Along with the well-recognised influences of Stanislaw Brzozowski or Edward Abramowski, one can find in those texts strong vernacular tendencies, manifesting themselves in, inter alia, her attempts at describing the familiar environment or nativeness of Polish culture. These are accompanied by other threads, sometimes astonishing ones, such as the delicate and level-headed yet clearly present anti-Semitic rhetoric. How come it appealed to such a liberal writer as Dabrowska was in her young years? Beside that, she was known in the period of 1918-1939 from her famous anti-anti-Semitic speeches. It seems that in the period preceding World War I, almost everyone was overwhelmed by the national fever. Boleslaw Prus, S. I. Witkiewicz, Aleksander Swietochowski, Wladyslaw Orkan, or E. Wasilewski would use a similar tenor, referred to by Andrzej Walicki as a 'nationalistic discourse'; and so did M. Dabrowska. This type of utterance was not infrequently getting intermingled with the anti-Semitic idiom. This was one of the ways which the anti-Jewish rhetoric took to penetrate into the political/social-commentary output of the one who was some time later to become famous for her novel 'Noce i dnie'.

Keywords

EN

ANTISEMITISM; NATIONALISM; POLISH LITERATURE

Discipline

• PHILOLOGY_&_LINGUISTICS: PHILOLOGY & LINGUISTICS

• Publisher: Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Teksty Drugie (Second Texts)
• Year: 2005
• Issue: 6(96)
• Pages: 7-17
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Borkowska G.

• G. Borkowska, Instytut Badan Literackich PAN, ul. Nowy Swiat 72, 00-330 Warszawa, Poland

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

06PLAAAA00982261