Ruch Literacki

This article re-examines the life and work of August Antoni Jakubowski, illegitimate son of the Romantic poet Antoni Malczewski. After the November Uprising (1830–1831) Jakubowski was deported from Austria to the Unites States, where he wrote The Remembrances of a Polish Exile, the fi rst book on Polish history, literature and education to be published in America in English. The article discusses ‘Melodie amerykańskie’ [American Melodies], a little known poem which has not yet been the subject of an in-depth literary analysis, as well as a number of hitherto unknown references to Jakubowski in the letters his student Mary Pierce Poor wrote to her parents between 1836 and 1837. The article presents the results of research into primary source material in American collections; the project was funded by a grant from the Kościuszko Foundation.

This article is an attempt to assess the role of oral performance in the life and work of Cyprian Norwid. The study covers the whole range of the poet’s cultural practices, i.e. his lectures, recitations, and public readings with the matching introductions and comments, which exemplify Norwid’s idea of the living word (cf. Lectures on Juliusz Słowacki, On Recitation, On the Freedom of Speech), as well as the accounts of those who were in the audience at these events. The analyses show that Norwid was convinced about the exceptional value of the spoken word and importance of the oral aspect of language. He employed it systematically to create the public sphere, to infl uence people, uphold a ‘community of truth’ and open it up onto a metaphysical universe. This interpretation of Norwid’s thought draws on the poet’s own understanding of the word, the ancient Greek oral tradition (Socrates and Plato), the Judeo-Christian ideas of verbal expression and nineteenth-century philosophical and linguistic concepts of orality to present a less known profi le of Norwid, an artist of oral expression in an age of the written and the printed word.

The article explores the role of musical themes in the work of Kazimierz Wierzyń ski from the perspective of auditive practice in the context of what is known about the poet’s personal tastes and appreciation of the art of sounds and noises. Most attention is paid to Wierzyński’s verse written in exile because there the musical references became more complex than in the prewar and the postwar phases of his poetic career. It was then the musical references began to function as a sign of the poet’s encounter with individual compositions and musical traditions – a record of a direct, personal and touching musical experience – rather than a metaphoric amplifi cation or a rhetorical ornament.

The poetic work of Aleksander Wat has enjoyed unfl agging popularity for the last 25 years. Critical appreciations of his work invariably emphasize a strong connection between his poetic work and some elements of his biography, i.e. detention in NKVD prisons, deportation to Soviet Central Asia, and the pain and stress of an incurable illness in the late fi fties and sixties. This article argues that the key to his verse can be found the concept of somatopoetry which takes into account both the heightened awareness of the body and the sensuality of Wat’s lyrical utterance. More specifi cally, this article attempts to draw an acoustic map of the poet’s verse written between 1957 and 1967, using the tools of f musicology, cultural anthropology of things and audio-anthropology. Drawing on Andrzej Hejmej’s concept of musicality Type 2 (thematization of music in a literary composition), the article tries to trace the presence of instruments in Wat’s work and assess their phonic and cultural roles in the creation of meaning. Finally, the article claims that the phonic layer beneath the references to instruments forms a track that can be described as a route to the poet’s death.

The article analyzes the symbols, motifs and images in Mieczysław Jastrun’s poetry to reconstruct his vision of childhood within in a broad philosophical and anthropological perspective, drawing in particular on Gaston Bachelard’s idea of “reveries toward childhood” and Mircea Eliade’s discussion of sacred time and space. In many of Jastrun’s poems the evocation of childhood is associated with a pastoral summer landscape; it is not, however, a specifi c summer, an identifi able moment of his life, but an image representing the essence of childhood. It is an evocation of happiness, security, a promise of future wellbeing, an experience of fullness of being or a communion with nature and a transcendent reality. The interpretation of individual poems clearly point to the conclusion that childhood remains for Jastrun a sacrum, an immanent sacred site. It is, however, also a lost childhood, viewed from the perspective of an adult who has been irrevocably expelled from that Arcadia and has to live in a transient world doomed to death. The longing for the idyllic childhood can be found throughout Jastrun’s verse, nowhere as poignant as in his last volume of poems, completed before his death.

The article examines the relationship between two types of narration, the autobiographical and the automythographical, and two concepts of time upon which they depend, the linear and the cyclical respectively. The analysis is focused on the use of the strategy of recurrence, i.e. having the same episode from the author’s life recur in various stylistic variants in the course of a single autobiographical story line. The case in point is Artur Sandauer’s Zapiski z martwego miasta (Notes from a Dead City), where iteration is used not to illumine the author’s experience but rather to establish and fi x its irreparable inaccessibility. It seems that the author’s formal games with the conventions of traditional autobiography are connected with problem of Jewish assimilation in Polish society.

This article examines the problem of motherhood in the poetry of Joanna Mueller from the perspective of feminist body studies. Throughout her poetic work Mueller keeps analyzing the formation of a new subject, a process closely connected with the creation, or giving birth, to new poems and reproduction. She dignifi es the experience of motherhood by focusing on the peculiar condition of ‘being two in one’. This is further enhanced by the emblematic arrangement of the individual poems (formed into mounds, folds, the womb, the vagina, and blood vessels) and references to the primeval Mother Goddess. The matrifocal narration exalts the maternal female body to its sovereign position, justifi ed by its power over life; indeed, the combined force of Mueller’s naturalistic description and discursive momentum not only subverts the patriarchal narrative of female passivity and inferiority but in a way sacralizes the feminine principle.