Ruch Literacki

This article presents a contexual analysis of the religious dimension and themes of identity in the poetry of Zuzanna Ginczanka. This attempt at a systematic reconstruction of the beliefs and attitudes that inform her poetic work and can be referred to a broadly conceived idea of the sacred. Ginczanka draws mainly on elements of the Jewish and the Christian cultural imaginariums, which she treats with various degrees of epistemologi-cal skepticism. As this study tries to demonstrate, in her work they are integrated into characteristic semantic games founded on the all-pervasive analogies of pantheism.

This article presents a reading of Julian Stryjkowski’s prose in a context which has been hardly taken into account in earlier studies, namely the work of Jewish authors in Galicia at the turn of the 19th century. The interpretation focuses on both the conglom-erate of issues addressed by those writers (modernity, Eastern European Jewish culture, linguistic Polonization) and a model of prose they developed, which combines autobio-graphical elements, ideological controversies and engagement with the Jewish tradition. A distinctive feature of Stryjkowski’s prose is his negotiation of Jewish heritage, modern ideologies and European artistic trends within a philosophical and ethical framework defined by the Holocaust.

This article examines the Jewish protagonists (most frequently victims of the Holo-caust) of Polish literary prose of the last twenty years (2000–2022). The way those cha-racters are constructed indicates that Jews continue to live in the subconsciousness of successive Polish generations. When a Jew makes his appearance in a literary work, it is usually in sites of collective trauma, i.e. the scene of a pogrom, the site of a former concentration camp (Lager) or a ghetto, or an area adjacent to it, “on the Arian side”. Among Polish writers who follow that paradigm are Józef Hen, Tadeusz Słobodzianek, Stanisław Gromadzki, Beata Chomątowska, Igor Ostachowicz, Sylwia Chutnik, Piotr Paziński, Marta Masada, Magdalena Tulli, Monika Rakusa, Zyta Rudzka, Bożena Keff, Mariusz Sieniewicz, and Piotr Szewc. Their work shows that recent Polish literature has become a symbolic post-Jewish site, where decades after the Shoah, the traumatic loss is still actualized in the consciousness of both Jews and non-Jews.

This article deals with the problem of time in Adam Zagajewski’s poetry. The discus-sion begins with a critical reading of Magdalena Sukiennik's study ‘Time frozen in time-lessness’: Adam Zagajewski’s poetry’. A re-examination of the poems cited in that article leads to a series of conclusions that throw doubt on her use of the term “timelessness” and offer a different interpretation of Zagajewski’s approach and understanding of time. (The quotation in the title comes from ‘A Conversation with Friedrich Nietzsche’ from the volume Płótno [Linen]).

This article presents a recently found poem ‘Wróżby’ [Fortune Telling] by the Józef Czechowicz, one of the leaders of Poland’s early-20th century avant garde, and situates it at the intersection of his juvenilia and mature poetry. The article also brings to light some unknown facts from the poet’s biography.

Of the poets of the last century, Paul Celan (1920-1970) has had perhaps the greatest influence on the visual arts. Among the artists who have been inspired by his work are the German Anselm Kiefer, the Polish American Daniel Libeskind, the Hungarian- Ger-man László Lakner, the Italian Giosetta Fioroni and Giuseppe Caccavali. Of particular importance, however, is Celan’s presence in the work of Mirosław Bałka (b. 1958), con-sidered the greatest Polish visual artist/sculptor. In a recent interview with Friederike Günther, Bałka explicitly acknowledges a close (‘most friendly’) relationship – something his connoisseurs and admirers have always known about – with Paul Celan. The artist claims that Celan’s poetry had been known to him since the 1990s (the first translations of his poetry into Polish, by Ryszard Krynicki, were published in 1972) and from that moment on it constantly accompanied him, even when he did not mention it openly. The purpose of this article is to trace, at least partially, Celan’s diverse impact on the works of the Polish artist, beginning with direct quotation, primarily in the sound art installation Me Reading Lichtzwang (2011), to which the majority of this text is devoted. The use of black and white empty space also signals the connection between the poet and the sculptor. The presence of Celan’s “person” and work in Bałka’s work is also linked to the use of the German language, which in Bałka’s work takes on a peculiarly dual char-acter. German not only carries within itself echoes of war and the Holocaust; it is also a fundamentally incomprehensible and alien language, par excellence “un-Polish”. Yet thanks to numerous German loan words in the language of his legacy trade (Bałka’s father and grandfather were stonemasons) German sounds familiar to Bałka. It symbo-lizes the ethics of dedication and hard work, not least manual labor, which is an essen-tial element of the artist’s job.