Ruch Literacki

This article discusses the artist friendship between Oskar Miłosz, a poet who lived in France, and Bronisława Ostrowska, who stayed in Paris with her husband, a sculptor, in 1907–1913. In 1910 the Ostrowskis founded of the Society of Polish Artists, of which Miłosz became a member. Ostrowska became interested in Miłosz’s poems and, as the Society was dedicated to the presentation of Polish arts and literature, she decided to translate them into Polish. She eventually had them published in 1919 after her return to Poland. Among them was Miguel Manara, a mystery drama, which she saw as an abso-lutely fascinating palimpsest of all kinds of wisdom. Indeed, its echoes are ever-present in her poetry, complemented with Juliusz Słowacki’s visionary philosophy and biblical meditations. Her poems, especially those that come from the time she worked on the translation of Miguel Manara, resonate with Miłosz’s thought. A theme that preoccu-pied both of them was the notion of loving care (Sorge). For Ostrowska it was the key to self-awareness and a source of experiences that lead through sacrifice and suffering to a spiritual rebirth.

This article analyzes two poems by Maria Konopnicka that are believed to have been inspired by classic Hindu writings. One is ‘Manavadharmasastra’, which is clearly in-debted to the Laws of Manus (Manusmriti), and the other is ‘Sybilla pisze’ [Sybilla writes], which, as has been suggested by Wiesław Olkusz, contains references to the Upanishads and the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. The article is attempt at identifying Konopnicka’s sources and putting her encounter with them in the context of their contemporary reception. It also analyzes the similarities and differences between the her poems and the original Hindu texts.

In the work of Maria Komornicka the sense of deprivation and dearth, a characteristic feature of the Young Poland (modernist) poetry, culminates in an overwhelming, self- annihilating ecstasy. This article explores the way in which the evocation of various elements of the traditional cultural spaces (the garden and the woodland, the feast, the desert and the grotto) are used to confront one’s own self and other selves. The actors in such confrontations usually suffer from some kind of deficiency or deprivation, which becomes their distinctive characteristic. Maimed, self-harmed, intoxicated, driven into a state of self-inflicted agony the poetic “I” uses every occasion to bear witness to one’s anguish in as many ways as possible. The text of ‘Nazajutrz’ [Tomorrow] is no exception. It is one of latent identities revealing its own distinctiveness, the self-revela-tory act of asserting one’s crippled identity of an unnatural Stranger (Odmieniec) who is a stranger even to himself/herself.

This article contains a reading of the poem ‘Nadchodzi noc’ [The night is coming] by Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski in the context of his evolving poetic biography, primarily with regard to the gradual spiritualization of his idea of the ‘naked soul’. While the brain occupies the central position in in Korab-Brzozowski’s poetic landscape, it is not merely a material locus of consciousness. The crucial element of the chain of events in ‘Nad-chodzi noc’ is located inside the brain, the dark area where, paradoxically, the physio-logical trigger goes into spiritual overdrive (the dying sunrays “go up in a fire and glow, / Which puts the night to flight / Forever.) The unexpected ending of a matter-of-fact description can be an indication of Korab-Brzozowski’s joining Stanisław Przybyszewski in his 1890s Berlin battles with plain naturalism (die bloße Schilderung). Yet at the same the young contributor of the magazine Życie [Life] entered into subtle polemic with his literary master. Later, as secretary of the flagship modernist magazine Chimera, Korab- -Brzozowski kept up a shifting balance, i.e. a poetic agon, between Przybyszewski’s antinaturalism and the latest developments in empiricist physiology (Angelo Mosso and Cesare Lombroso among others).

<p>Stefan Żeromski&rsquo;s short story &lsquo;Zapomnienie&rsquo; [<em>Oblivion</em>] (1891) describes with naturalis-tic precision a morally outrageous incident from the life of a peasant family, ground down by poverty and brutal oppression. This article is attempt to adjust the story&rsquo;s historical-literary context so as to make it more accessible to modern ethical sensitivity. The reading presented here combines a number of complementary approaches, which reintegrate Stefan Żeromski&rsquo;s story into a series of &ldquo;Turns&rdquo; in 20th and 21st-century humanities.</p>

This article deals with ‘Nad Gopłem’ [At Lake Gopło], the least known and arguably the oddest story in the Przybyszewski oeuvre. The book – missing from the writer’s biblio-graphy and, as far as we know, not mentioned in his correspondence – was addressed exclusively to the young reader. What’s more, it was commissioned by the editors of a Polish language teaching textbook (published by Ossolineum in 1928) from a writer with a reputation of a debaucher and corruptor of the young. The article points out that Przybyszewski’s text is an inspirational tale about the beauty spots of Kujawy and a story about the education of an artist. Showing that Poland is born in a personal, intimate and creative experience and beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, he pins down the sources of his writing onto a local map and argues that the artist’s ties with his homeland are unbreakable. The loose string d of reminiscences creates a warm, atmospheric portrait of the landscapes around Lake Gopło and, thanks to unobtrusive emotional touches, succeeds in eliciting a similar affection in the reader. In this way the story meets per-fectly the contemporary postulate of anchoring the educational goals in reading materi-als “based on the experiences of a child” and reveals an unknown facet of Przybyszew-ski’s persona you would not expect to find in a celebrity engulfed in scandal. He knows how to strike the right tone and find the right format to “talk” to children and gently touch their emotions.

This article examines the techniques of affective landscape creation in Stanisław Przybyszewski’s prose poems (or, rhapsodies, as they were called then), i.e. Requiem aeternam (1900; Polish version of the Totenmesse, 1893), Androgyne (1900), Z cyklu Wigilii [From the Vigils cycle] (1899; Polish version of Vigilien, 1895) and Nad morzem [At the Sea-side] (1899). The analyses make use of the methodology and insights of the affect approach, somato-poetics and haptic theory to discuss the relationship between the dy-namics of Przybyszewski’s landscapes and their psychological resonance, the relation-ship between the affects and the non-material elements of space (temperature, the soundscape) and the somatic perception of the landscapes proffered by the poems.

So far the criticism of the Young Poland drama has not produced studies of the narrative and plot structure in Stanisław Przybyszewski’s Odwieczna baśń [The Perennial Fairy Tale] (1906). This article cannot claim to make much progress in this field, even if it takes up the problem of silence, which is of great importance in the turn of the century literature and in Przybyszewski’s play. The play, of course, is made up of words, and yet their domination is inextricably connected with silence. If the surfeit of words in mo-dernist drama has been a matter of complaint by every generation of critics, in Odwieczna baśń they can as well run out and give way to a pause. Przybyszewski’ handling of the words/silence balance follows his theoretic postulates without being in any way disre-spectful of the dramatic conventions of the time. Silences crop up in the dialogues and accentuate the characters’ gestures and moments of reflection; they are given some room in the stage directions; and, what is even more important, silences on stage are built into the performance as a means of jogging the audience’s attention.