Prof. Kazimierz Bartoszyński was one of the most respected theoreticians of literature in Poland. He worked closely with the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The period of Professor Bartoszyński’s greatest activity as a researcher coincided with the time when he was fascinated with structuralism, but his interests went far beyond these methodological issues. The author of this memoir, who was the Professor’s doctoral student, portrays him through the prism of their conversations on scholarly topics and her private relationship with Mr. and Mrs. Bartoszyński, which lasted for many years.
Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, the two volumes of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, contain photographs from the author’s collection. The images, about thirty in each of the books, may be viewed as her family albums, which she inspects in the acts of remembering and reinterpreting the past. In retrospect, Lessing sees her crucial life-choices and her artistic, intellectual and political positions as shaped both by major historical processes occurring during her life-time (colonialism, the world wars, Communism) and by her ambivalent emotional attitudes to her immediate environment (her family and personal relationships). Whereas individual photographs, which accord with middle class aesthetics and ethics (Bourdieu), communicate stories of family integration, the memoirs challenge such an interpretation of the images and reflect the author’s striving to liberate herself from her family and the values they cultivated. This paper seeks to explore Lessing’s articulations and visualizations of her multiple identities, her relatedness to her significant others and her use of photographs as a narrative strategy and as a means of interrogating her cultural situatedness.
This is a memoir of Professor Kazimierz Bartoszyński. The theme of this essay is silence – literary silence, which is the result of convention, anecdotal silence, which prompts scholarly meetings and friendships, and metaphysical silence, which is connected with death.
This is an anecdotal memoir of Kazimierz Bartoszyński, which describes the community of members of the Institute of Literary Research and their university colleagues from all over Poland. It was at this institute that the largest scholarly project related to Polish studies was set up. This project was carried out for half a century and resulted in organizing annual conferences on literary theory as well as in publishing the proceedings of these conferences.
In the graphic memoir I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2006) Bernice Eisenstein examines her identity as a second generation survivor, tells stories about her parents, and depicts the community of survivors in Toronto. Eisenstein’s memoir is most often described as a graphic novel. However, the book is a specific combination of words and drawings, and can be hard to categorize. In my paper I focus on Eisenstein’s complex relationship with her father presented in the novel, and argue that the way she writes about him and draws him is anchored in his unsaid Holocaust experience. I read Eisenstein’s portrayal of her father in reference to the concept of postmemory, and suggest that Eisenstein was heavily affected by her father’s experience of being a Holocaust survivor. Her deep connection to the past is demonstrated in I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors through drawings, selected memories, and references to numerous works of culture. I discuss how Eisenstein draws her father and how she commemorates him in images – not as a victim, but as extremely strong personas: movie star, gangster or sheriff. I analyze the role of shtetl culture in the memoir as another way of linking present with past. I suggest that the books and movies about the Holocaust which Eisenstein references in the memoir create a basis for changing the confusing, or even unexpressed traumas, into an understandable story.
It is important to notice that romantic literature abounded in diverse memoirs. The most characteristic feature connected with this kind of literature is the fact that many of the memoirs were written by prisoners and exiles, commanding officers and even peasant farmers. Furthermore, many opuses were created after long journeys to the East. This study, focused on memories of Pastor Henryk Leopold Bartsch, presents different ways of experiencing and describing the Oriental sphere. Moreover, the following paper shows the lack of differences between the romantic and enlightenment style of depicting foreign territories and presents Pastor’s Bartsch own way of describing other customs and religions. To summarise, the whole study tries to find an answer to the question about the most significant function of romantic memoires.
The essay discusses Jakub Sobieski’s diaries and memories, which belong to the finest specimens of such writing in Polish Baroque. The diary and memoirs of the Moscow campaign of 1617-1618 have survived in only a few copies, with the most important ones in Biblioteka Czartoryskich in Cracow. Reconstruction of Prince Władysław’s struggle for the Russian crown is mostly based on a handwritten testimony called Diariusz ekspedycyjej moskiewskiej dwuletniej królewica Władysława A. D. 1617 [The Diary of the Two-Year Moscow Campaign by Royal Prince Władysław in 1617]. The events described in the diary span from April 5th, 1617 to December 28th, 1618. The author has arranged the material chronologically, focusing on the text as historical evidence. The conclusion of the text, where Sobieski quotes a fragment of Tacitus’s Annals, points out to the argumentative function of the work, which was supposed to explain to Poles (the king, the sejm and senate, the nobility) that commissaries were right in signing the Truce of Deulino, regarding the safety of the homeland threatened by Turks and Tatars, and the budgetary difficulties of the Crown and Lithuania. The second work by Sobieski is more of a Baroque memoir, composed as a temporal sequence (some fragments have the structure of diary). The author reconstructs the events of the Moscow campaign, beginning with the death of tsar Ivan the Terrible (1584), and leads the narrative to the end of 1618, when the Truce of Deulino. The work is characterized by greater coherence in presentation of facts, their selection, and a more general point of view, pointing out to the failure of Polish dynastic policy. Sobieski seems to be critical of the Polish intervention and the Polish raison d’état in this respect. He is also critical of the young prince’s campaign of 1617-1618; he was a commissioner for treaties with Moscow during the campaign.
Autorka, uczennica Profesora przedstawia drogę życiową swojego Mistrza. Szczególną uwagę poświęca osiągnięciom naukowym Profesora Witolda Śmiecha i obszarom naukowym, którymi On się zajmował. Zwraca również uwagę na działalność Profesora poza Uniwersytetem Łódzkim, przede wszystkim w Łódzkim Towarzystwie Naukowym.
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The author, a former student of Witold Śmiech, describes the story of her professor’s life. She especially concentrates on his scientific achievements and his research fields. She also describes his activity outside of the University of Lodz, especially in the Lodz Scientific Society (Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe).
The study focuses on the memoirs, private literary sources, particularly on their distinct type known as křiky and pláče (complaints and laments), and their different interpretations in the fields of history and literary history. Four texts are presented, predominantly literary ones, that canal so be studied as historical sources. They are Václav Černý’s Paměti, especially its second volume called Křik / Pláč koruny české, Ladislav Jehlička’s Křik koruny svatováclavské, Jan Zahradníček’s Pláč koruny svatováclavské and Jakub Arbes’ Pláč koruny české neboli Perzekuce lidu českého v letech 1868–1873. The main aim of the study is to find and describe their common features and their close relation to history.
The subject of the article is the issue of genre classification of the writings of Kazimierz Sarnecki, who was a permanent agent of the Deputy Chancellor of Lithuania Karol Stanisław Radziwiłł, at the court of Jan Sobieski III. Sarnecki’s main task was to obtain information about what was happening around the monarch — above all his state of health and all the other matters, even of the lowest importance. Incarrying out his assigned tasks, Sarnecki kept a diary which, at intervals of about a week, he sent to his principal along with a separate letter. In it, he reported on his own activities, answered questions, and supplemented information that he did not record in the diary. They were two separate texts written independently but he sent them in one package. He used two different names to describe them (diary and letter). Researchers of old Polish literature, however, were looking for a term that would allow Sarnecki’s entire preserved output to be given one name. Two such suggestions were made. The first of these comes from Janusz Woliński, the publisher of Sarnecki’s work, who called it a memoir. This is not a correct term because the work does not meet any of the elements of the memoir definition (Sarnecki does not focus the narrative on himself, his storytelling of the events is subordinate to a consistent pattern, there is also no time distance to the described matters). The author of the second is Alojzy Sajkowski. He created the term “epistolographic relation” because in the diary he saw an element subordinate to the letter accounts; he also noticed the similarity between the writings of Sarnecki and Jan Piotrowski, who kept a diary during the siege of Pskov (1581–1582) and from time to time rephrased subsequent parts, giving them a form of a letter which he then sent to his patron, Andrzej Opaliński. This term is not correct enough either. Sarnecki was not creating one work which combined elements of a diary and a letter but two separate works — a diary and a letter. Similarities with Piotrowski’s diary only go so far — Sarnecki did not rephrase anything, but sent “raw” material, and did not include the diary into the letter. That is why it is a better solution to use the names introduced by the author himself, because in this way we define the nature of his writing output most accurately.
The article discusses the controversy surrounding the 1988 publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses from today’s perspective, drawing on the writer’s memoir Joseph Anton. It provides an overview of Rushdie’s career, a brief resumé of the events that followed the Ayatollah Khomeini’s edict calling for the murder of the novelist, as well as a critical assessment of Rushdie’s latest book. Published in September 2012, the memoir fails to shed any new light on the debate concerning freedom of expression and a writer’s social responsibilities. It mostly focuses on the singular plight of a novelist forced to live in hiding. The opportunity to bring out some important links between politics, literature and history, which Rushdie’s autobiographical account might have provided, seems to have been wasted.
Der Band enthält die Abstracts ausschließlich in englischer Sprache.
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Being a survivor to the Buchenwald concentration camp may implythe inability to tell this tragic experience. Semprun tries to go beyond this difficulty by writing L'écriture ou la vie. His trauma and the camp’s omnipresence determine a noncoincidence between interior and exterior time and the fragmentation of the text. Chronological linearity makes way for a labyrinthic time caractherized by a continuous change of present into past tense and by several flashbacks and metatextual digressions. The latter are also the indication that the elaboration process is underway and this suggests that art in itself makes the evolution possible.
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Le numéro contient uniquement les résumés en anglais.
The article analyses descriptions, memories, and notes on Dresden found in eighteenth-century accounts of Polish travellers. The overarching research objective is to capture the specificity of the way of presenting the city. The ways that Dresden is described are determined by genological diversity of texts, different ways of narration, the use of rhetorical repertoire, and the time of their creation. There are two dominant ways of presenting the city: the first one foregrounds the architectural and historical values, the second one revolves around social life and various kinds of games (redoubts, performances).
Pamiętnik dla dzieci [A Memoir for Children] by Helena Masalska: A Testimony of Twentieth-Century Latvian PolishThis article presents Pamiętnik dla dzieci [A Memoir for Children] by Helena Masalska, a text which may not be very long but is certainly important for scholars documenting the Latvian variety of twentieth-century Polish. Written in a colloquial variety of the language in 1992, the memoir tells about the childhood and the youth of the author, born in 1917. The study considers the influence of Russian and Latvian as well as a dialect of Belarusian on the author’s Polish, provides a description of its features of spelling, and reconstructs the sociolinguistic situation in which the Polish of Helena Masalska was shaped. Pamiętnik dla dzieci Heleny Masalskiej – świadectwo polszczyzny łotewskiej XX wiekuArtykuł jest prezentacją Pamiętnika dla dzieci Heleny Masalskiej, niezbyt długiego, ale ważnego dla badacza tekstu dokumentującego łotewską odmianę polszczyzny XX wieku. Pamiętnik… jest napisany potoczną odmianą języka polskiego. Powstał w 1992 roku, ale opowiada o dzieciństwie i młodości autorki urodzonej w 1917 roku. W artykule ukazano wpływy języka rosyjskiego i łotewskiego oraz gwary białoruskiej na polszczyznę autorki, scharakteryzowano elementy pisowni, a także zrekonstruowano sytuację socjolingwistyczną, w której kształtowała się polszczyzna Heleny Masalskiej.
Some European nations and countries stayed in the area of totalitarianism for a long time. This fact and various ways of transforming and self-identity in a totalitarian society require careful studying in a broad scientific spectrum. Studying of the dissident movement is one of the important aspects of this multifaceted research topic. Resistance movement against totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century on the territory of Ukraine is closely linked with the concept of Ukrainian sixties. The place and understanding of the role in the cultural and political opposition to totalitarianism, features and images of the sixties are considered through memoir texts as social, political and aesthetic phenomenon of sixties. Self-reception of representatives of the rebellious generation gives the important information about forms and manifestations of resistance for understanding the phenomenon of the sixties, its place in the spiritual coordinates of the twentieth century.
This paper aims to explore the breakdown of communication in the novels written by Doris Lessing, and investigate into the nature of experience that is conveyed despite the failure of language. Lessing’s fiction is abundant with the symptoms of breakdown, and the heroines’ experience is often rendered by means of fragmentation of the narrative form. Anna Wulf, the heroine of The Golden Notebook, can only deal with her experience by writing about it in separate notebooks; the protagonist of Memoirs of a Survivor delivers a most confusing memoir in which facts and events intertwine with dreams and visions. According to Lacan’s theory of the three registers of human experience, the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, language fails in the face of the real. Nevertheless, the twentieth-century trauma theory allows for investigating into the realm of the real. Critics such as Cathy Caruth and Geoffrey Hartman emphasise the importance of reaching for what is without words, reading despite the silence and fragmentation. By applying their approach to Doris Lessing’s fiction one can truly appreciate her recognition of the human condition in the modern world, and read beyond the breakdown of communication.
This paper examines the link between the notion of ‘cultural translation,’ initially introduced by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994), and autobiographical writing by a translingual writer: Edward Said’s memoir, Out of Place (1999). As an ArabAmerican intellectual, Said culminates his writing career with a memoir, in which he represents the educational years of his life. Said shows through the narrative that the interplay between Arabic and English language and cultures strongly infl uenced the formation of his identity. Thus, this paper explores reading his memoir as an attempt at ‘cultural translation’ according to which diff erence is not necessarily trapped in binary oppositions of self/other; East/West; home/foreign land – to name only a few. Difference in this context rather opens a possibility for more fluid boundaries allowing for negotiation and change.