From text to life – this is the direction that delineates a trajectory conducted by Józef Czapski reading À la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust. Turning to diary notes (Wyrwane strony and Dziennik wojenny) and sketches the author of the article discusses the manner in which Czapski rendered Proust an instrument of recognition: finding a bearing in one’s creative work (successes, failures, crises), in life and experiences: emotions, affects, sensations, and passions. The sketch Proust w Griazowcu, situated in this perspective – a record of lectures on À la recherche du temps perdu and conducted by Czapski in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at the turn of 1940–1941 – is presented not solely as yet another evidence of “intoxication by Proust” but predominantly as a performative text. In it Czapski creates himself as a causative subject.
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Od tekstu do życia – to kierunek, który wyznacza trajektorię prowadzonej przez Józefa Czapskiego lektury W poszukiwaniu straconego czasu Marcela Prousta. Sięgając po zapiski dziennikowe (Wyrwane strony i Dziennik wojenny) oraz szkice, autor artykułu omawia w jaki sposób Czapski czyni z Prousta instrument rozpoznania: rozeznania się we własnej pracy twórczej (sukcesach, porażkach, kryzysach) oraz we własnym życiu, we własnych przeżyciach: emocjach, afektach, doznaniach, namiętnościach. Umieszczony w tej perspektywie szkic Proust w Griazowcu – zapis wykładów o Poszukiwaniu prowadzonych przez Czapskiego w radzieckim obozie jenieckim na przełomie 1940 i 1941 roku – ukazany zostaje nie tylko jako jeszcze jedno świadectwo „intoksykacji Proustem”, ale przede wszystkim jako tekst performatywny. Czapski czyni (w) nim to, o czym mówi i stwarza sam siebie jako podmiot sprawczy.
Galer from Wierzchownia. Preliminaries The papter contains the analyis of Marcel Proust’s pastiche Sainte Beuve et Balzac, it juxtaposes the fragments from Balzac’s letters written by Proust with the original texts. The paper concentrates on the issues which are very rarely undertaen-Proust’s and Balzac’s attitudes to Poland before its partitions at the end of the 18-th century and its cultural heritage.
This study of Julian Rogozinski’s, translation of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, (the 7th and final volume of his cycle of novels In Search of Lost Time) into Polish proposes to find the translator’s dominant. First, the author examines Proust’s ideas on literature and lists the major aspects of his prose. Secondly, she verifies the hypothesis as to whether the translator considered the form to be the key to understanding Proust’s works. This seems to be the most important part of the prose which must be reproduced in the translation.
The article offers a study of two Proustian metaphors: “a living barometer” and “the little barometric figure”. After a brief reminder of the role of time in The Search for Lost Time, we move on to an analysis, sometimes intratextual, sometimes psychoanalytic, of the two metaphors, which places it in the context of family relationships and illness. Indeed, the barometric figure triggers a whole series of imaginary mechanisms which refer to the sensitivity and the constitutive versatility of the Search on the one hand, and to the writing itself on the other hand, but above all root this image in a complex game of identity tensions.
In this paper, the author addresses the transformation of the memory of Marcel Proust as a writer in the contemporary information society, taking the work of Nicolas Ragonneau as a starting point. The creator of the Proustonomics blog, using quantitative data and large datasets concerning the author of In the Search of Lost Time, calculates his social influence. Proust is presented as a model of some social practices and artistic pastiches. Thereby, Nicolas Ragonneau turns imitation into a basic strategy of memory of the writer as well as critique of its modern approach focused on the work and its originality.
The article is an attempt to read the story The Maidens of Wilko by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s book Proust and Signs. The interpretation key is the concept of “sign” proposed and developed by the French philosopher.
The name of Jiří Pechar is inextricably tied up with the Czech translation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The second complete publication of the novel was undertaken by the publisher Rybka in 2012 — its first two volumes, translated by Prokop Voskovec, were carefully revised and the rendition of the third to seventh volumes was, after Voskovec’s death, taken up by Pechar. Pechar’s participation in the revision was crucial as he drew on his profound knowledge of Proust’s complete oeuvre and its specifics. This analysis relies on the working document provided by Pechar, and it reveals that it is possible not only to generalize about the emendations and categorize them, but also to present the arguments accompanying them. Based on a detailed comparison of selected passages, it makes it clear that Pechar’s translation does work in Czech: besides being sophisticated and well grounded in theory, it offers brilliantly worded, reader-friendly solutions.
Serotonin (2019) undoubtedly represents Michel Houellebecq’s most “Proustian” novel. His narrator, a forty-six-year-old agricultural engineer, who became desperately impotent by a regular absorption of “new-generation anti-depressants”, scrutinizes his “phallocentric memory” to revisit all his missed appointments with the great Romantic Love that could have saved him. Our analysis proves that Serotonin is not just a “prefiguration of the Yellow vests movement”, an “illustration of European agricultural crisis” or a “conservative flirt with Christianism” (which commentators are accustomed to identify in Houellebecq’s work) but also a somewhat astonishing reflection on the functioning of memory and the mechanisms of love.
Written on the sidelines of a new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah into Polish, the article evokes the problem that the translator had in finding the equivalent of the term inverti. This problem serves as a pretext to speak, on the one hand, of homosexuality in Proust, on the other, of language as the subject of the novel. In this context, the role of Albertine and the etymological tirades of professor Brichot are studied in particular. The author also highlights the testamentary character of this part of the Proustian cycle.
Taking up Antoine Compagnon’s thesis, according to which Sodom and Gomorrah constitutes a privileged place to look at the whole Proustian cycle, the article focuses on the social dimension of the novel, as well as on cruelty. In this context, the image of Jews and servants, and the role of the baron de Charlus are studied in particular. For the author also discusses the vision of love, especially homosexual, to show how Proust’s approach stems from sadism and masochism.
In the present study, the author focuses on the phenomenon of involuntary memory, as treated, most famously, in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He, nonetheless, attempts to trace a “pre-history” of the notion in question by making reference to one particular passage to Rousseau’s Confessions that perhaps does not name the phenomenon of involuntary memory in an explicit manner, but certainly does treat a concrete experience that seems strongly reminiscent of Proust’s later and more sophisticated analyses. In the second part of the paper, he attempts to show that literature is not the exclusive domain in which involuntary memory becomes a crucial topic. He presents a “musical” analogy of involuntary memory by comparing Proust’s writing to the Wagnerian notion of leitmotif.
Proust's world in Combray had only two sides: „For there were […] two sides [«côtés»] where we could go for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door, according to the side we had chosen [«d'un côté ou de l'autre»]: Méséglise-la-Vineuse side, which we called also Swann's way, […], and the Guermantes side”. However, as is known, this famous passage from Proust's novel Du côté de chez Swann is not just about geography. In the image of the two sides, separated by an impossible distance, one can see the preview of the ideological and emotional plan of the whole cycle À la recherche du temps perdu. However, the peculiarity of this „mental topography” (the narrator says that it is “one of those mental distances that not only move away, but also separate and transfer to another plane”) allows us to see in it an example of a more general cognitive paradox. According to the author, behind this literary description, a certain conceptual model exists in which spatial relations – or phenomena described by spatial metaphors – are radically problematized. So, it's not about removing the distance between the two sides; on the contrary – the cognitive effort would aim to grasp this situation in its original tension and instability („recto/verso”), recognizing the oscillatory logic of the “phantasm” in the figure of walks d'un côté ou de l'autre, which – in Lacan’s words – “sustains the subject in its fundamental instability”. The author analyses this problem of „undecidability” in Proust with many examples from In Search of Lost Time.
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Proustowski świat w Combray miał tylko dwie strony: „dwie «strony», w które można było pójść na spacer, i tak przeciwstawne, że idąc w jedną albo w drugą stronę [d’un côté ou de l’autre], nie wychodziło się od nas przez te same drzwi: stronę Méséglise-la-Vineuse, którą nazywaliśmy także stroną u Swanna […] i stronę Guermantów”. Jak jednak wiadomo, w tym słynnym fragmencie powieści W stronę Swanna chodzi nie tylko o geografię: obraz dwóch stron, oddzielonych nieprzekraczalnym dystansem, to także zapowiedź ideowego i emocjonalnego planu całego cyklu W poszukiwaniu straconego czasu. Jednak wyjątkowość tej „mentalnej topografii” pozwala – jak uważa autor – widzieć w niej przede wszystkim ogólniejszy paradoks poznawczy, pewien model konceptualny, w którym relacje przestrzenne – lub zjawiska opisywane za pomocą przestrzennych metafor – ulegają radykalnej problematyzacji. Nie chodzi już o usunięcie dystansu między dwiema stronami; przeciwnie – istotne jest o uchwycenie tej pierwotnej i modelowej niejako sceny w jej źródłowym napięciu i niestabilności („recto/verso”), o rozpoznanie w figurze spacerów „to w jedną, to w drugą stronę” oscylacyjnej logiki „fantazmatu podtrzymującego podmiot w jego zasadniczej chwiejności” (Lacan). Autor analizuje problem „nierozstrzygalności” na wielu przykładach zaczerpniętych z dzieła Marcela Prousta.
This article examines the historical and legal contexts behind the publication of Polish translations of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Jean Santeuil. It explores how state policies and copyright laws in post-war Poland restricted access to foreign literature, including Proust's works, which were considered ideologically incompatible with the socialist regime. The concept of „restricted works” is introduced to describe culturally significant texts limited by legal and political factors.
The paper discusses - against the background of selected philosophical concepts - two basic problems related to the meaning of subject in the well-known novel by Marcel Proust entitled A la reserche du temps perdu. The first of the analyzed problems is related to the question what the meaning (signifie) of subject is, and the second, formulated in opposition to the postmodemistic standpoint of Gilles Deleuze, to the reasons why the significance (Bedeutsamkeit) of the subject is so intensively exposed in the novel. The subject that can be found in Proust’s masterpiece is considered as an egotic, individual, and stratified entity, whose deepest, spiritual layer ensures identity, and, most probably, exists beyond time. The spiritual subject is distinguished by persistent philosophical pursue of the essential truths of human being, and is also concentrated on the role of the author and art. The profound domain of truth remains hidden as long as we are absorbed by everyday life. It is the specific mental power pertaining to the spiritual subject, i.e. our intelligence, that allows us to reveal that domain. Only the non-mimetic literature, as postulated and realized in Proust’s novel, employing the method of “three-dimensional psychology” relying on intelligence, instead of commonly used “two-dimensional psychology”, can present to the eyes of potential readers, as if through the optical glasses, the essential truths of subjective worlds. The significance of the subject finds its expression not only in the application of the first-person narrative form, in the differentiation between the latent and revealed narrator - the fact that creates an aesthetic impression of surprise, in the monophonic character of the novel related to the structural unity imposed by the latent narrator, but also in the specific poeticity of the novel. Determining the style of Proustian prose, this poeticity evokes the atmosphere of clarity and happiness. The poeticity is achieved by such means of style as metaphors, various cultural references shown through the prism of subjective experience, phrasal complexity, melodiousness, and others.
Take It All (1964) is a remarkable autofiction film in which the Quebec filmmaker Claude Jutra (1930–1986) responds to Proustian theories about the superiority of literature (a ‘pure art’) over cin- ema and other arts based on ‘direct imitation of reality’. The article first summarizes Proust’s scepti- cal attitude towards cinema, and then analyzes the way in which Jutra attempts to rehabilitate this art through autofictional procedures. Using Deleuze’s concept of the ‘time-image’ (l’image-temps), Ju- tra proves that cinema, like the Proustian novel, is capable of practicing polyphony, multiplying nar- rative identities, and finding surprising connections between details of events from different time zones. Despite their diverging views, it is possible to note numerous points of contact between the two authors. Both Proust and Jutra agree on a practice of autofiction (avant la lettre, of course) that turns the life of an individual into a kind of interpretive key to the universe and a means of opening the eyes of the reader/viewer.
The article concerns the reception of Marcel Proust’s novels by Anna Iwaszkiewiczowa (1897–1979) - an excellent expert in literature, music and painting, polyglot, erudite, humanist with a predilection for the exact sciences. She was the first translator of, In Search of Lost Time into Polish; the excerpts she translated testify not only to her outstanding talents at translation, but also to her reading insight and a kind of closeness to Proust’s writing and thought. Iwaszkiewiczowa also translated important critical articles by foreign authors to familiarize Polish readers with European proustological discussions. In addition, she devoted a lot of attention to the French author in her private journals, but above all, she creates her own, inspiring interpretations of Proust’s work in literary essays. The juxtaposition of the writings of Marcel Proust and Joseph Conrad turns out to be particularly interesting and fresh, though surprising at first. This article analyzes these texts, presenting them in the context of contemporary aesthetic, philosophical and even physical concepts (including Witkacy’s “pure form”, Rudolf Otto’s “numinosum”, Hermann Minkowski’s “space-time”), to which Iwaszkiewiczowa referred directly or indirectly. Parallel reading of both types of her considerations - those scattered in dailies, where she noted private impressions, as well as those announced in the form of carefully prepared articles - brings an interesting and unique image of Proust and of Iwaszkiewicz herself. The article is an attempt to give the floor to Anna Iwaszkiewicz, who is commonly perceived as the wife of a well-known writer. The author of the article argues that the figure and creative output of Anna Iwaszkiewiczowa are worth careful reading and research analysis, and above all, a reminder.
Charles Swann i Athos Fadigati: postać Żyda i kochanka w utworach Prousta i Bassaniego Streszczenie Celem badań jest znalezienie związków pomiędzy cyklem Marcela Prousta W poszukiwaniustraconego czasu i Powieścią ferraryjską Giorgia Bassaniego. Analiza sposobu, w jaki autorzykonstruują postać Żyda, została przeprowadzona w świetle refleksji Giacoma Debenedettiegoi Hannah Arendt poświęconych naturze tożsamości żydowskiej. W opowiadaniu BassaniegoZłote okulary w szczególny sposób uczuciowość i pozycja społeczna homoseksualisty AthosaFadigatiego znajdują analogię w figurze Charlesa Swanna, ,,światowego Żyda”. W tej perspektywieProust staje się świadkiem zmiany, obserwatorem początku procesu prowadzącegodo powstania obozów zagłady, elementów rzeczywistości, z którą Bassani musi siękonfrontować. Słowa kluczowe: Marcel Proust, Giorgio Bassani, Charles Swann, Żyd, kochanek, homoseksualista,sprawa Dreyfusa Charles Swann and Athos Fadigati: the figure of the Jew and the lover in Proust and Bassani Abstract The aim of the research is to find a link between Recherche of Marcel Proust and GiorgioBassani’s Novel of Ferrara, analyzing the way both of them construct the figure of a Jew, inthe light of Giacomo Debenedetti’s and Hannah Arendt’s position related to Jewish identity.Giorgio Bassani’s novel The Gold Rimmed Spectacles has been chosen because Athos Fadigati,a homosexual, and Charles Swann, a Juif mondain, demonstrate some similarities in termsof sensitivity and their social position. Here Proust witnesses a change, the beginning ofa process leading to extermination camps: the reality Bassani must confront. Keywords: Marcel Proust, Giorgio Bassani, Charles Swann, Jew, lover, homosexual, theDreyfus affair
At first glance, Marcel Proust’s aristocratic spirit and ambiance are entirely dissimilar to the plebe- ian milieu of the Quebec playwright and prose writer Michel Tremblay, whose poetics involve rais- ing the joual slang of the Montreal suburbs to the tones of ancient Greek tragedy, medieval religious drama or/and the social novel. Proust is also largely absent from the cultural references and allu- sions that sprinkle Tremblay’s works, which include Balzac, Zola, Camus, Vian, Sartre and Genet. Yet Marcel Proust seems to underlie Tremblay’s first major novelistic project — the hexalogy Chronique du Plateau Mont-Royal (1978–1998), which in the form of a family chronicle traces the birth of the future author. In this rewriting of Marcel Proust, albeit in the third person, the future writer in the making — the storyteller of these novels, designated as a ‘little boy’ or ‘the child of the fat woman’ — appears merely in the background, as a convergence of the other characters, who initiate and repre- sent the fundamentals of Michel Tremblay’s art. My analysis of this specific configuration of char- acters in the hexalogy will be completed by one of the novels in the Traversées cycle, La Traversée du continent (2007), the first volume of the Diaspora des Desrosiers, in which the journey of the future author’s mother Nana represents a discovery and an apprenticeship in art. Implicit references to La Recherche du temps perdu can be delineated throughout the text. A characterization of Tremblayan poetics will complete the presentation of the narrative strategy.
This article analyzes an essay by the contemporary French writer Philippe Sollers in which Sollers analyzes Marcel Proust’s drawings found in the French writer’s private letters and manuscripts. I draw on Sollers’s notion of “inner experience,” which he, in turn, borrowed from Georges Bataille, and discuss the idealistic interpretations of Proust’s eye/gaze as found in the metaphor of the book as an “optic instrument.” Then, referring to the Derridean category of “the specter,” I analyze the significance of Proust’s drawings for the understanding of his legacy in contemporary literature.
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Artykuł poświęcony jest analizie eseju francuskiego współczesnego pisarza, Philippe’a Sollersa, stanowiącego komentarz do rysunków Marcela Prousta pochodzących z jego prywatnej korespondencji oraz z manuskryptów. Wychodząc od zapożyczonej przez Sollersa od Georges’a Bataille’a idei „doświadczenia wewnętrznego”, poddana zostaje dyskusji idealistyczna interpretacja proustowskiego spojrzenia wyrażająca się w metaforze książki-narzędzia optycznego. Następnie, w odwołaniu do derridiańskiej kategorii „widma”, autorka analizuje znaczenie rysunków dla kształtowania się pamięci o pisarzu we współczesnej literaturze.
The translation of La Bible d’Amiens and Sesame et les Lys was a way for Proust to take an interest in religious art, but also to cultivate his own vision of art. Ruskin was for Proust a guide who participated in the support of his artistic self by transfering a certain number of aesthetic conceptions to which his mind would never have been able to access on its own. Proust succeeds in recognizing the decisive dimension of the Christian religion and its implications for Ruskin's aesthetics. Transcending the religious dimension, Proust realizes that Christian architecture, as understood by Ruskin, acquires a meaning other than religious, namely that of a past sublimated by the powers of art. Thus the historical dimension is annihilated in favor of an aesthetic perception of works from the past. Our article therefore aims to show how this experience of translation allowed Proust to deconstruct the aesthetic vision of the author of the translated text, while constructing a vision of art that is his own.
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