This article takes up Adam Dziadek’s somatic approach to literature to explore the theme of erotic experience in two poems by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, ‘L’amour Cosaque’ and ‘Amore profane’. With the help of inputs from gender studies and the contemporary theories of the subject it has been possible to profi le the ‘I’ of the poems as a deeply fragmented and sexually ambiguous subject, and, upon the evidence of the elusive autobiographical details woven into the text, as a subject suspended in a liminal space, between the real and the fi ctive world. After analyzing the body represented in the text, both perfect and decrepit, as well as traces of the poet’s carnality that interfere with the text and the reader’s sense of his own soma the article arrives at the following conclusion: in Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s lyrics the body seems to project its impressions and experiences onto reality, thus blurring the border between the inside and the outside.
This article analyses the transformative influence of Marcel Proust’s fiction on early works of Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1925–1927) in the light of the short story Nowa miłość [A New Love]. The article argues – on the basis of a reconstruction of the order in which Iwaszkiewicz read the volumes of In Search of Lost Time – that the date of its composition has be to revised and proceeds to explore the affinity between the two writers. The analyses, which draw on Harold Bloom’s infl uence theory, compare and contrast their handling of scenes and narratives, relations of analogy and visions of love. The article claims that Iwaszkiewicz was keen to enter into dialogue with the French author and adopted some of Proust’s techniques, yet without compromising his own creative autonomy. In the course of that dialogue he developed a notion of Proust’s literary art which, it is argued, provides the key to the interpretation of homoeroticism and narcissism in Nowa miłość.
This article deals with the reception of Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry and his biographic legend by the poets of the last decades of 19th and the first decades of the 20th century, though, in fact, its earliest phase belongs to the literary period of pre-Modernist, anti-Romantic reaction (which described itself by the name Positivism, epitomized by the novels of Bolesław Prus). The process of Rimbaud’s reception proceeded in two dimensions, on the intergenerational level and in dialogue between poets and translators. Interestingly, it acted as a veritable catalyst of changes in the poetics of writers across the spectrum, from the old school (Józef Weyssenhof and Eliza Orzeszkowa) to the modernist avant-garde. The influence of Rimbaud was by no means uniform and went beyond the usual names like Zenon Przesmycki (Miriam), Julian Tuwim or Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. This article casts its net widely to include representatives of three generations, among them some of the less acclaimed authors.