In the history of Polish, Russian, and Serbian literature, Cyprian Norwid (1821–1883), Konstantin Sluchevsky (1837–1904), and Đorđe Marković Koder (1806–1891) are treated by scholars as incomprehensible based on their peculiar style, which is unanimously considered dark and difficult to decipher. At the same time, the researchers rarely pointed out that the poets themselves raised the hermeneutical and epistemological questions about the (un)intelligibility and (in)cognisability of the world in their pieces. Therefore, the interpretation of their poetry must lead to a reflection on the foundations of understanding in general. The purpose of my analysis of their selected poems is to examine the (meta)hermeneutical and (meta)epistemological dimension of the output by three authors in question.

Entering into polemics with the often unarguably accepted thesis on the “non-picturesqueness” of Tadeusz Peiper’s poetry, the author of the paper attempts to present that the writer employed various ways to incorporate the image in his verses, and that, undeniably, disallowing for the image, one is unable to justify his theory and poetic practice. The image is understood in the avant-garde manner: as an event, action, movement, and as an affective category, syneasthesically intense, open to somatic-semantic flows.
Although Peiper often refers to the principles of new art, the image remains for him a static entity. In his poetic programme he includes the notion of fragmentary images that in many ways correspond to the avant-garde (and subsequent) aesthetic theories. Referring to the older and newer theories of image and viewing (e.g. by Władysław Strzemiński, Gottfried Boehm, and Georges Didi-Huberman), Alina Świeściak demarcates the role which Peiper ascribes to “new picturesqueness” in his conception of poetry and poetic practice, as well as sets out the manner the picturesqueness affects the ideological-aesthetic unity of this concept and practice.

The paper attempts to show the problems of Tadeusz Peiper’s poetics from the perspective of New Economic Criticism. The researcher is guided by the idea of problematising and deepening a simplified image that views Peiper as one who writes in a socialist spirit, a poet-singer of liberal, neo-classical economy and an economic man model, while his argumentative strategies are reduced to a thesis on the totalisation of economy as a fundamental principle of modernity (and of aesthetic law). The purpose of the sketch is to show Peiper’s output as more dynamic and often internally inconsistent, based on a conflict between the writer’s declarations and economical fantasies (logic of the market, chains of semantic equivalents, and periphrases seen as a link of exchange between various symbolic systems) and his real language practice. What might emerge from that is a picture of a detailed collector and a petty saver who faces the deficit in the means of expression; a poet who treats the poem as a grand deposit and, against the market rules, treasures in it everything that terrifies him by circulation possibility, thus a risk of liquidating and of loss of value.

The paper aims at interpreting Stanisław Rembek’s selected pieces, namely the novels “Nagan” (“Revolver”) and “W polu” (“In the Field”) as well as short stories from the times of the 1918-1921 Polish-Soviet War. The author’s considerations focus on pacifistic aspects of Rembek’s interwar writing. The study also presents the modes with which the prose challenged the traditional in Polish literature war image, violating at the same time the Tyrtaean-martyrological-Messianic picture of armed forces. To accomplish this goal, the author uses the term imaginary understood as a figure of collectively experienced drama. Additionally, Bartłomiej Bielas refers to the present state of Rembek studies, and sketches, based on Rembek’s statements, his attitude to pacifism.

The paper is an innovative reading of the 1925 poetic volume “Trzy salwy” (“Three Salutes”). The conducted research accounts for the material form: the cover, format, paper type and gsm, as well as biographies of separate copies. Aleksandra Więcek carries out a comprehensible analysis of the volume and tries to find the answer to the question about its role in the process of shaping the Polish proletarian literature, since the publication of “Three Salutes” initiated a press discussion about the tasks and duties of this poetry. The fact that Mieczysław Szczuka, an avant-grade graphic artist and eulogist of the Polish constructivism, sat for some time in silence is also subject of observation. The volume was republished twice, namely in 1956 and in 1967 and both publications are made subjects of analysis. Additionally, the authoress discusses the arrangement of poems in this collection, and she reads “Three Salutes,” starting from the poetry through the reception, to the back cover.

The article interprets Maria Kalota-Szymańska’s volume “Sezon w Tatrach i po sezonie” (“Season in the Tatra Mountains and after the Season”). The collection, published in 1981, is distinguished by its compositional symmetry and duality in terms of sensual topography. The sense of touch plays a unique role in this compilation. Exposing tactile landscapes creates an intimate relationship with the elevated space. It is a two-sided relationship: the lyrical subject who climbs uphill not only touches the rocks, but also feels the touch of the mountains. Initially, there are poetic representations of direct experiences in the Tatra Mountains; the second part of the collection is filled by memories, while sensuality leads to haptic sublime. However, this convention is transcended by focusing on the issues of ethics and environmental responsibility.

In the second part of the lecture, Jacques Derrida reflects on the essence of the political and analyses different animal representations of state and sovereignty. He makes references to numerous biblical images of monsters and beasts, which eventually leads him to rethinking Aristotle’s idea of man as a political animal and to deconstructing Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy of social and political order. Concluding that man is a wolf to man. Derrida recommends re-reading psychoanalytical explanations of myths and fables. Following Sigmund Freud, the author leaves open the question of limits in analogies between animal societies and human state institutions.

The Old Polish biblical-apocryphal narratives belong to the most extensively preserved Polish-language medieval texts (a total of more than 2,000 pages of manuscripts and old prints). The paper presents a phenomenon of these texts, which is called source multilayeredness. It is a combination of several factors influencing the text’s form (the Polish text is built of many sources; the sources are multi-layered and multi-genre, of which the Old Polish authors are well aware; the linking proceeds on various layers). This allows a different interpretation of the various apocryphal features that until now have many a time been valued negatively.

Dorota Kołodziej in her paper analyses Tadeusz Peiper’s 14 poems containing the equals sign. Even though in the poet’s first two volumes the pieces with the symbol = make up circa 1/3 of all lyrical rhymes, the function of this sign in the poet’s output has not to this day been extensively researched. The paper aims to partially fill this gap and it proposes to place Peiper’s verses in the context of information theory which, although ahistorical, allows to explain numerous ostensible inconsistencies in the poetic project of the avant-garde principal. It also helps to move back to the interpretative conceptions included into the classical examinations of the 1960s structuralism inspired by cybernetics, and complemented with observations of the modes in which artistic neo-avant-garde exploited information theory.

The article investigates the problem of time modelling within the graphics of the free verse. Here, time is understood as a variable of the semiotic frame, the laws of which permit the recognition of which is an infinitive extending of the present as a non-empirical time-form. It is argued that this peculiar dimension of time may be expressed through the long line. The body of material consists of Pierre Reverdy’s poems and their translations by Julia Hartwig, the juxtaposition of which addresses the translation of time in the free verse. Additionally, the study elaborates on the non-cohesion of Reverdy’s poems, where time transcends the frame of the verse in pursuit of eternity perceived as a non-text. The paper concludes that time can be gauged not only in the prosodic structure of traditional versification, but also in the graphics of the free verse, which suggests a new research avenue in the theory of verse.

The study examines the issue of shaping the modern discourse on literary description. The research is carried out on most recognised and influential texts directly referring to this form of expression (e.g. by Gotthold E. Lessing, Émile Zola, György Lukács, Allain Robbe-Grillet). Special attention is devoted to negative evaluation of description. This attitude, strengthened by Lukács, developed mostly around a series of oppositions: deep versus surface, autonomy versus subordination, action versus stagnation, anthropocentric versus non-anthropocentric. Additionally, the paper contains a statement that the categories, traditionally linked to description of a threat to the work’s coherence, position of the protagonist, clarity and purposefulness of communication, served the writers and critics of the nouveau roman as justification to employ it as a tool to deconstruct the classical form of the novel.

The article is the first part of considerations about the genre viewed in the categories of a vision of reality, which also includes worldview. The reflections grow, inter alia, from a polemics with Witold Sadowski’s text “Gatunkowe obrazy świata: sielanka, litania, sonnet” (“Generic Worldviews: Idyll, Litany, Sonnet”) in which a similar approach was compared to a concept known in language studies and referred to as linguistic worldview. Adopting the analogy, the author carefully examines what Sadowski either paid no attention or treated superficially, namely the difference between so called linguistic worldview and generic worldview as well as the potential and limitations that stem from it. The principal theses of this part consist in a conviction that, unlike in language, worldview is less an inherent element of a given generic structure, but rather its interpretation that changes, depending on many factors, and that is supported by those properties of genre which in language would refer to connotations.

The paper describes a scarcely known and absent from bio-bibliographical studies piece by Wincenty Ignacy Marewicz “Bukiet zamiast kolędy na Nowy Rok 1799. Dla Jaśnie Oświeconej Księżny J[ej]m[o]ści Izabeli z hrabiów Flemingów Czartoryskiej, generałowej ziem podolskich i generałowej felcmistrzowej wojsk Jego Cesarsko-Królewsko-Apostolskiej Mości” (“A Bouquet instead of a Carol for the Year 1799. For Your Enlightened Majesty Princess Izabela Czartoryska from Counts Flemings, the Wife of Crown General of Podolia and of Marshal of General Confederation of Kingdom of Poland”). The piece was issued as a casual print while Marewicz’s stay in Lvov in winter 1798. Written in verse and in prose, it is an interesting realisation of a loose combination of three various forms of society’s laudatory poetry: a bouquet, a carol, and a portrait, as well as their thematic and stylistic-linguistic dominants.
In the coda, the paper includes Marewicz’s work prepared in accordance with the main principles of transcribing 18th c. texts.

Henryk Sienkiewicz has been known in China since 1905—the year he received the Nobel Prize. The time also marks the publishing of the translation of “Latarnik” (“The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall”). For more than 100 years the writer’s output has been raising interest in The Middle Kingdom, and reception if his writing is distinguished by unique dynamics. The paper aims to present the modern modes of Sienkiewicz’s reception by Chinese researchers, includes an analysis of his influence over the Chinese society performed from the viewpoint of receivers’ horizon of expectations formulated by Hans Robert Jauss, investigates the impact of the Polish writer on Chinese literature performed from the point of view of intertextuality, and offers a presentation, in the light of gender studies, of Sienkiewicz’s latest literary criticism. The study reveals that Sienkiewicz’s reception in China is a world scale phenomenon. Continuity and dynamics of internalising his works and multidimensionality in Sienkiewicz studies form a full image of his presence in the Middle Kingdom.

The review examines Patrycja Bąkowska’s treatise „Formy ekspresji podmiotowości nowoczesnej. Tożsamość indywidualna i zbiorowa w poezji polskiej schyłku XVIII i początku XIX wieku” („The Ways of Expression of Modern Self. The Individual and Collective Identity in Polish Poetry from Late 18th to the Beginning of 19th Century”). The reviewer comments on the attempt at a literary historical reflection on the Enlightened Self—a complex and multiform phenomenon.

The paper assesses the anthology entitled “Early Aesthetic Writings” by Johann Gottfried Herder. The reviewer stresses the significance of the recently published book that offers the Polish receivers insight into the unknown to this day treatises, reviews, and essays by this German philosopher, whose writings attract attention of scholars of various research circles and from many European countries.
Maciej Junkiert also takes up the issue of Herder’s reception in the Polish historiography and literary studies as well as formulates a question whether the 2024 publication offers a chance for a new opening in research on Polish-German intellectual relations at the turn of the 18th and the 19th c., as well as on those of the late 19th c.

The paper analyses Danuta Ulicka’s book “Doświadczanie czasu w przestrzeni archiwum” (“Experiencing Time in the Archives”). The volume is assessed as an outstanding research endeavour. To justify this stance, the reviewer points at the following values of the study: a superb discussion about so-called archival turn, presentation of Ulicka’s own archive research, masterly lecture in the history of modern Polish and European literary studies that smoothly shifts to the practice of literary theory, and stylistic charm of the content matter exposition.

The review refers to Łukasz Kucharczyk’s monograph “Granice ludzkiego poznania. O wybranych aspektach twórczości Jacka Dukaja” („Limits of Human Cognition. On the Selected Aspects of Jacek Dukaj’s Creativity,” 2024). The book is an example of only seemingly popular science, contrary to the publisher’s statement. The assessment focuses on the lapses in the study whose content matter value should be treated with caution due to the mistakes that it contains.