The paper refers to relations that hold between modern literature and the architectural discourse of the first decade of the Inter-War Years. Tadeusz Peiper’s 1927 article “W Bauhausie” (“In the Bauhaus”) published in “Zwrotnica” (“The Switch”) is made subject of considerations. The piece forms a starting point for presenting the assumptions of functionalistic architecture and its reception in the Second Polish Republic, referring mainly to the works of Szymon Syrkus, one of the leading representatives of functionalism in the native architecture. The avant-garde’s will to transform reality and conviction about the artist’s deliberate need to take part in building new reality besides shaping modern life, both close to Peiper, are conductive in entering into a dialogue between the program texts and Peiper’s poetic creation on the one hand and the 1920s architectural and urbanistic discourse, especially with architectural functionalism assumptions formulated by Walter Gropius on the other hand. The author of the paper suggests developing a space for common research reflection between modernist architecture and avant-garde literature.

The paper refers to the connections between avant-garde and politics as well as to the issue of engagement in the context of art and politics. As the author remarks, avant-garde politicisation is the result of a number of factors, most vital of which being the deepening crisis of capitalist reproduction, unleashing a renewed category of reengagement between art and politics. He also sees the rise in cultural theory and philosophy of an antihistoricist relationship to the revolutionary past in Russia, in which the transformative moments of futures past in the context of Russian avant-garde as an important network of links that connects the phenomena. On the cultural level, he refers to Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Rancière, and researching the key issues of historical Russian avant-garde, he explores the categories of mass work of art, democratization, and production as elements that influence artistic techniques (Walter Benjamin). Apart from considerations about historical avant-garde, Robert is also occupied by analyses of contemporary post-avant-garde phenomena in which the new image, technology, and a network of their distribution produce a new creative commons from below that remain outside of the main parameters of the art world. Examples to illustrate this kind of activities are discussed here collective project of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers gathered around Chto Delat? (Russian: Что делать?) whose artistic practice stressed the need to change the priorities of artistic practice and shifts emphases to allow new spaces of association as well as to exchange relationships between “professionals” and “nonprofessionals.” This produces the conditions that Roberts calls a third or suspensive avant-garde, which draw on the futures past of the historic avant-garde.

This essay invokes the ontological ethos of the avant-garde work as a particular way of disclosing meaning. The avant-garde, according to Philippe Sers, signals not the ruin of representation but its redefinition; not the debunking of truth but a new relationship to truth. Here Sers manifests his impatience with current accounts of the avant-garde that remain fixated on its nihilism, formal novelty, and value-leveling dimensions. The contemporary infatuation with transgression epitomizes a false transcendence that only plays into the logic of contemporary capitalism. Highlighting the strains of iconophobia that pervades language-based aesthetic theories, the essay calls for a new reassessment of the cognitive and transformative power of images. The status of the original avant-garde work lies not in its negativity but its utopianism, its harboring the moment of transcendence that is profoundly ethical in its implications.

In 1922, eleven years before publishing “Sklepy cynamonowe” (“The Cinnamon Shops”)—Bruno Schulz’s official literary appearance, the writer issued under a pen name a short story “Undula,” his real premature debut. The recently discovered work opens new perspectives in interpreting its author’s oeuvre. “Undula,” a literary counterpart of a print cycle “Xięga bałwochwalcza” (“The Booke of Idolatry”), describes hypnagogic hallucinations the protagonist is haunted by while suffering from severe, almost fatal illness. Close reading of the text and its comparison with Schulz’s other writings lead to the conclusion that “Undula” is an initiation piece on which his further literary and plastic creations are based.

The paper offers an attempt at interpreting Czesław Miłosz’s hidden intertextual references contained in his essay “Saligia” from the collection “Ogród nauk” (“The Garden of Science,” 1979). The poet takes up the subject of the cardinal sins in which pride is made the key to explain the paradoxical tension between positive and negative aspect of the vice. The sense of considerations about tainted human nature finds its way to a large extent in the mode Miłosz refers to other texts of culture that he many a time intentionally conceals, calling the reader to uncover and to study them on their own. In this case most probably the references are the writings of Evagrius Ponticus and, possibly, “The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things” by Hieronymus Bosch. Parallel reading of the works and Miłosz’s essay leads the researcher to explain what, in the essayist’s view, the devastating and beneficial dimension of pride is and the way in their contexts he conceives of his vocation to be a poet.

The article presents the history of Czesław Miłosz’s output reception placed in the columns of the monthly “Preuves”—the first exemplary journal published by Kongres Wolności Kultury (Congress for Cultural Freedom). It was one of the few periodicals in which Miłosz, a fugitive from beyond the Iron Curtain, was allowed to publish. His 15 year journalistic presence in the monthly triggered reactions of intellectuals (François Bondy, Ignazio Silone, André Prudhommeaux, and Konstanty A. Jeleński) who sympathised with this Congress. The researcher discusses the French reviews, critical papers, and essay writings focused on Miłosz. Plentiful commentaries refer both to the poet’s stance and his writings, especially the essayistic ones. The commentaries in question in most cases are of approving character. Among the quoted papers one discerns a dominating model of the poet’s gesture and work: their authors consistently placed Miłosz’s production into the trend of political writing.

The distinction between modernism and modernisation, drawn by Jerzy Jedlicki (“Świat zwyrodniały. Lęki i wyroki krytyków nowoczesności <A Degenerate World>,” 2000) in the contexts of disputes about European culture around 1900, proves correct also in reference to the visual culture in Poland of the first half of the 20th c. It helps to grasp the disparity in views on the issue of leftist or socialist artistic avant-garde in a better way than employing a bipolar perspective that hinges on such oppositions as freedom vs. Stalinism, or avant-garde vs. socialist realism. Some authors of recent publications on the visual culture in socialist Poland, e.g. Piotr Juszkiewicz’s “Cień modernizmu” (“The Shadow of Modernism,” 2013) or Anna Markowska’s “Sztuka i rewolucja. Wieloperspektywiczne ujęcie sztuki polskiej zaraz po wojnie” („Art and Revolution. A Multi-Perspective Overview of Polish Art after the World War II,” 2023), depict modernism and modernisation in a negative light, linking them with the political system of the Polish People’s Republic and the hierarchy of values that it implied. The paper delivers arguments to support separation of those categories from the scheme defined as anti-communist paradigm and to view them as two intermingling trends of aporetic modernity.

The author of the sketch analyses the title of Eliza Kącka’s work “Strefa zgniotu” (“Crash Zone”) and its structure, pinpointing its anti-literary features such as counter-fictionality and rejection of fictionality. The observations are made more insightful since Andrulonis examines the narration and assesses the extent to which the story can be regarded autobiographical. The subject of scrutiny is also the literary genetic matter characterised by idiomaticity against the background of the existing patterns of the genre, though it also draws from other inspirations, e.g. the private diary or texts that Ryszard Nycz calls contemporary sylvae. Placing “Crash Zone” into the trend of anti-literature tradition (especially a comparison with pieces by Miron Białoszewski) serves as an important point of reference. This train of thoughts is enriched by analysis of sociological conclusions which the story induces.

The paper is an attempt to recollect a generally omitted from literary historical recapitulation figure of Kuba Kozioł, a poet who reached his peak activity in the 1980s and 1990s, and who authored only one individual poetic volume and a dozen or so poems published in the press of the transformation period. Although Kozioł possessed one of the most unique voices in the latest Polish poetry, he presently remains an unpublished man of letters and is known only by a handful of enthusiasts. In this paper his output is interpreted from the perspective of new and attractive in the Polish 1990s humanities post-structural languages, as well as in the context of his poems’ foundational Anglo-Saxon tradition, especially Ezra Pound’s poems that he translated. Recollection of this figure does not lead to viewing him as one of the native deconstructionists who experimented with the language to unmask its incompatibility to extra-linguistic reality. The author tries to point at such places in which this poetry’s theoretical fashions corresponding with the Western ones miss each other, leaving a pressing “remain” outside of the deconstructive paradigm.

Incomplete archive of Tadeusz Kozanecki, stocked in the University of Warsaw Library and in the Joint Libraries of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the University of Warsaw, the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Polish Philosophical Society, offers an insight into the problems that this historian faced when realising an ambitious plan to edit Maurycy Mochnacki’s “Dzieła wszystkie” (“Complete Works”). Most important is the fact that the endeavour proved too complex to be handled by one researcher without philological competence. This project, initiated in the times of the Polish People’s Republic, encountered serious political obstacles since Mochnacki in his texts expressed negative attitude to the Czarist Russia, took part in the November Uprising, and because he was an émigré that involved into national issues. Thus, attempts to publish all his journalistic articles at that time could not have been successful. It must be stressed that while working on this edition, Kozanecki became the first to reconstruct the genealogy of the Mochnacki family, arrived at numerous biographical details, and pointed to many political aspects of his activity. Archive research and Mochnacki’s life facts reconstruction was a time-consuming activity that hindered completing the edition even in an abridged form. Apart from it, Kozanecki failed to form a competent editorial team to manage this task. The historian’s dispersed documentation clearly demonstrates the problems which the future editor of Mochnacki’s “Complete Works” must face.

The subject of the paper is correspondence between Józef Ignacy Kraszewski and Władysław Mickiewicz (Adam Mickiewicz’s eldest son) treasured in the Jagiellonian Library in two collections. The first contains Mickiewicz’s letters to Kraszewski, labelled manuscript 6520, that came into the library after Kraszewski’s death, while the second one, Kraszewski’s letters to Mickiewicz, collection Przyb. 101/65, is of unknown origin (it most probably comes from the Polish Library in Paris). This collection of letters, written between 1859 and 1887, consists of 400 items in Polish and in French, has been unpublished to this day and little is known about it (it is unmentioned even in the subject literature), nevertheless it serves as a source of invaluable pieces of information on Kraszewski’s and Mickiewicz’s lives and works as well as on the Polish emigration.

The paper is a reconstruction of events caused by a publication of a blasphemous poem “Ojcze nasz” (“The Lord’s Prayer”) in a Lvov “Gazeta Wieczorna” (“Evening Newspaper”). Its creator was a popular poet and middle school teacher Stanisław Maykowski (1880–1961), later an author of highly valued readings used to teach Polish. A few literary historical sources include mentions about the history of the newspaper’s confiscation, the author’s dismissal from work and charging him in the Lvov Criminal Court of Justice. Based on Maykowski’s handwritings, on remarks placed in memoir books, but primarily on numerous press articles, Jan A. Choroszy presents this 1914 issue as an element of literary life and an incident that reveals a chain of socio-political phenomena repeatable in various times, regions, and cultural formations. In its coda, the article contains the full text of “The Lord’s Prayer”.

The article is a commentary to three unpublished to this day pieces by Irit Amiel (1931–2021), one of the most eminent Shoah woman writers. The texts represent various literary forms (recollection, short story, poem) and were produced over a span of 60 years. The oldest is dated 1944—the period the author’s production is scanty as her constant literary activity started much later. The three selected pieces are placed within her recurrent themes and problems, namely the Shoah memory, individual fate of the rescued, the life in Israel, and at the same time introduce new tones and solutions to her writing. The presented publication announces a critical edition of Amiel’s collected short stories from the volumes “Osmaleni” (“Blackened”) and “Podwójny krajobraz” (“Double Landscape”) and archive texts in Polish to be published by Łódź University Publishing House edited by Anita Jarzyna, Marta Tomczok, and Agnieszka Piśkiewicz-Bornstein.

The paper refers to an unknown collection of mostly unpublished sketches by Roman Zimand from the years 1971–1978 treasured in the archive of the Literary Institute in Paris. Initially, it presents the circumstances that lead to the production of the collection and to Zimand’s idea about it. Further, the author analyses what Zimand wrote about private literature document, Polish People’s Republic private life actors, the relationship of the French politicians and intellectuals to communism, about the contemporary and the history of the Soviet Union, as well as about the problem of nation in the Poland–Russia–Ukraine triangle.

Jan Zieliński’s collection of sketches „Magiczne oświecenie” (“Magical Enlightenment,” 2022) is characterised by originality, especially in the sphere of art interpretation. The originality is jointly formed by the author’s vast erudition that manifests, inter alia, in an impressive variety (and profusion) of topics and problems. Zieliński’s exceptional knowledge is also revealed in hundreds of footnotes, many a time utterly comprehensive. The subject matter of the collection includes not only Polish issues, but also phenomena of European nature. Focusing on Enlightenment, the researcher in his numerous sketches goes beyond this cultural formation. “Magical Enlightenment” is worth its reading.

The review refers to the fifth series, specifically: “Dzienniki” (“Diaries”), of a reaching its finalisation full complete critical edition of Stefan Żeromski’s “Pisma zebrane” (“Collected Works”) edited by Zbigniew Goliński, and after his death continued by Zdzisław Jerzy Adamczyk. Out of this series, designed for seven volumes, two with Żeromski’s 1882–1885 notes have been issued to this day. This edition was prepared with utmost precision and meticulousness by Zdzisław Jerzy Adamczyk and Beata Utkowska, and with meaningful participation of Grażyna Legutko.

The review highlights the innovativeness of Luiza Nader’s monograph “Afekt Strzemińskiego. ‘Teoria widzenia,’ rysunki wojenne, ‘Pamięci przyjaciół – Żydów’” („Strzemiński’s Affect. ‘Theory of Seeing,’ War Drawings, ‘In Memory of Friends—Jews,’” 2018) marked by methodological pluralism. The author defines her analytical-interpretive method as balancing or oscillating between Władysław Strzemiński’s collages, drawings, and Teoria widzenia (Theory of Seeing). She demonstrates in the postwar art that responds to the Holocaust the existence of the witness that becomes entangled in violence due to closeness of borderline experience—the Shoah. The task of Strzemiński as the observer was not only condemnation of the postwar antisemitism, but also mourning for the Jews—friends, students, and anonymous victims whose image was preserved on the photographs used by the artist. His war and shortly after war achievements can be interpreted as homage to those devoured by the 20th century disaster.

Reflections on a subsequent version of a publication might include the remarks that, when referred to the initial version, would be of little importance. Depending on our understanding of Krzysztof Szymanek’s (the author’s) blurrily sketched conception of “Sztuka argumentacji.” “Nowy słownik terminologiczny” (“The Art of Argumentation. A New Terminological Dictionary”), the objections raised to him might either be accepted, rejoined, or merely disregarded. The useful work in question clearly lacks introductory and renovating cut, and filling the blanks that must have appeared throughout the twenty years from the moment the first version (“Sztuka argumentacji. Słownik terminologiczny <The Art of Argumentation. A Terminological Dictionary>,” 2001) was issued.