The article aims to analyze Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s poem entitled “The Asians”, the first work from his volume “The Weather Map”. The starting point for reflection is the motto of the poem - a conversation of three people in a theater foyer. The subject of this short exchange is the border between Europe and Asia, not the geographical but the cultural one. The dialogue can also be interpreted as an attempt to answer the question of the strength of the impact of the Euro-Asian empire — Russia. The author of the article endeavors to read the poem as the poet’s attempt to interpret his own biography. An important context is a poem by Alexander Blok, “The Scythians” written in 1918.
The essay “Confession of a Child of the Century” attempts to diagnose the act of reading in time of the new media. The author does not try to figure out the answer but investigates the influence of technology on the reading process. Shall we consider it as a possible thread to literature? Is the death of the book always negative in all aspects, or is it a new way to develop readership among people? Finally, maybe the dislike of new technology is just ignorance, maybe the discussion of both sides overdue and pointless? The essay is meant to provide a youth’s perspective on current reading trends, so it is not difficult to guess which side of discussion author defends.
The article is a review of important articles concerning the works of Czesław Milosz which were published in 2011, the Year of Czeslaw Milosz. The author investigates which aspects of the poet’s works are still interesting for researchers and whether any new interpretive perspectives have emerged.
The text provides a detailed interpretation of the poem Niewygoda (Discomfort), written by Iwaszkiewicz at the end of his life, situated among other achievements of his late poetry and confronted with his diary entries. The main issues addressed here concern the meanings that arise at the level of versification, lexis, style and composition of the analyzed work. The poet uses tropes that constitute a departure from his earlier typical poetics characterized by discretion and moderation. This poem becomes a poignant, deeply personal confession filled with a dramatic sense of somatic pain of old age and the intuition of approaching death.
The present paper is devoted to two little-known comedies by Aleksander Fredro: The Stagecoach (1827) and From Przemyśl to Przeszowa (1867). The interesting thing is that the main construction principle of both stories is the time span of the journey taken by the protagonists, defining the beginning and end of their adventures. The time spent together by the characters, travelling by stagecoach in one of the comedies and by train in the other, unites a casual group of persons, which results in creating new relationships. The common journey from Płock to Toruń and from Przemyśl to the Czech town of Przerów (“Przeszowa”) provides a framework for the storyline. Both the comedies are examples of travel writing, combining various theatrical conventions and traditions: farce, bourgeois comedy, drama, and serious comedy. In The Stagecoach, comedy characters of different origin (from burlesque to tragedy) meet and in From Przemyśl to Przeszowa, a number of farcical twists and situations are followed by a happy ending of a family drama. Both the comedies are set in the rich reality of nineteenth-century travels: from the appearance of different railway station buildings and the menu in each successive restaurant to animosities between particular passengers resulting from the discomfort of travelling together.
Arietta, written in the final months of Iwaszkiewicz’s life (1894–1980), is one of a cycle of poems Music for a String Quartet from his posthumously published volume of poetry Music in the Evening (1980). Like all the poems from this cycle, it is a short poetic “narration” the central them of which is an image of an old man waiting for death. However, the structure of Arietta distinguishes the poem from other works. Unlike other poems consisting mostly of two four-line rhymed stanzas, Arietta is the only free verse, which is decidedly different from the metrical scheme used by Iwaszkiewicz in this part of the volume. In order to express one of the most crucial experiences in life, the poet crosses the borders of the formerly used model of communication (a poem-song), creating a new unique form of a poem-arietta and imitating the basic structural pattern of a musical arietta — a cavatina. An excerpt from Goethe’s Wanderers Nachtlied, slighly changed when quoted at the end of Arietta (“Warte nun balde / Ruhest du auch”), can be read as an encouragement to experience patient, fear-free waiting for the end of life, but it can also be understood as a kind of “singing” which gives you courage to face death. This final “arioso” in Iwaszkiewicz’s poem is not only a pacifying lullaby but also an expression of heroic waiting for irrevocable death.
This essay is an attempt to analyze Ikwa i ja [The Ikva River and Me], a poem by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980). It was first published on 26 June 1927 in “Wiadomości Literackie” and then in the volume Return to Europe (1931). The poem was written during the re-burial of Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849), when the poet’s remains were relocated from Paris to Krakow. Iwaszkiewicz participated in these celebrations. In the absence of a direct echo of these events, Ikwa i ja is not only an occasional poem. It can also be regarded as an attempt to verify the importance of Słowacki’s achievements and perhaps more broadly — the importance of the romantic paradigm for the modern culture of the 1920s. The construction of the poem also shows its personal, intimate character for Iwaszkiewicz as he spent his childhood in the same place as Słowacki, namely in the Ukraine.
Recenzja: Antoine Compagnon, Demon teorii. Literatura a zdrowy rozsądek, przeł. T. Stróżyński, Gdańsk 2010, wyd. słowo/obraz terytoria, 276 [3] ss.
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The review concerns the Polish edition of the book Le démon de la theorie. Littérature et sens by Antoine Compagnon. The book contains a critical analysis of seven central questions of the theory of literature: literariness, the author (intention), the world (representation), the reader, style, history and value.
Recenzja: Witkacy i inni. Z kolekcji Stefana Okołowicza i Ewy Franczak, pod. red. B. Czubak i S. Okołowicza, Fundacja Profile, Warszawa 2011, 372 ss.
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The question “how much there is to Witkacy” accompanies reading the album from “Witkacy and others” exhibition in Wilanów, that — as Piotr Sarzyński writes in his review — “covers everything that linked Witkacy with photography”. The exhibition and the catalogue are a large project which would not be possible if not for Stefan Okołowicz and Ewa Franczak, owners of hundreds of photographs by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. Their contribution to making Witkacy-the photographer a figure in art history cannot be overestimated, and neither can their efforts of many years to keep his photographic self-portraits in public awareness. It was Okołowicz who showed the world Witkacy photographing. For thirty years, he has been collecting his works: paintings, drawings, photographs. He published the album “Against nothingness” and significantly contributed to the emergence of psychoholism. In his recent project, he marked out his presence and his role in propagation of Witkiewicz’s art more clearly than the previous time. He seemingly placed himself aside. In fact, he put himself in the center of the whole project. He showed, as Wojciech Nowicki put it in one of “Fundus’” essays, that photography cannot exist without an archivist
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