The article presents a thesis on the common fate of Michał Głowiński’s theoretical literary reflection on the short story and on his scholarly practice of short story creator. Marta Tomczok, analysing Głowiński’s seminal papers focused on the short story, confronts them with selected literary realisations and tries to show what the short story anthropology in his works was—a phenomenon that goes beyond both theoretical literary reflection and the Shoah literature.

The sketch attempts to interpret Michał Głowiński’s short story „Carska filiżanka i inne truwaje” („A Czarist Cup and Other Findings”) from the collection „Carska filiżanka” (2016) as an example of the author’s special autobiographical prose. Katarzyna Kuczyńska-Koschany reads the story in question also as a piece composed by a philologist and a specialist in culture as well as recalls a wide context of Głowiński’s creativity and awareness.

The author of the paper enters into polemics with Michał Głowiński, who in his essay “Pismak 1863” (“Newshawk 1863”) refers to the figure of Józef Aleksander Miniszewski, a publicist, who was divided with public opinion and assassinated on May 2nd, 1863. In common knowledge, the reason for hatred directed to the journalist was his cooperation with Aleksander Wielopolski and condemnation of revolutionary pre-uprising atmosphere that pervaded the Warsaw society between 1860 and 1863. Głowiński noticed an analogy between Miniszewski and marital law propagandists, especially one of them, namely a cynical and intelligent Jerzy Urban, which gave his essay a special overtone. Borkowska analyses the political commentary journalistic papers and the “black legend” of Miniszewski to arrive at conclusion that aversion and despise towards him resulted not only from anti-uprising rhetoric, but also from the unethical behaviours of his own, and those of other journalist, Aleksander Niewiarowski, which he was attributed to.

AFTER GOMBROWICZ: TOMASZ RÓŻYCKI’S NARRATIONS

Tomasz Różycki’s two epic poems “Dwanaście stacji” (“Twelve Stations”) and “Ijasz” as well as his two novels “Bestiarium” (“Bestiary”) and “Złodzieje żarówek” (“The Lightbulb Thieves”) are read in the article as narrative pieces composed after Gombrowicz, meaning as those that recall his “novel plays” based on a parody of traditional epic pieces. Parodistic-pastiche undertakings carried out on forms perform, similar to those in Gombrowicz, the functions of “contraband” carriers, and are to smuggle the current issues. The theoretical frame of the paper is made by the notion of constructive parody, adopted from Michał Głowiński’s sketch on Gombrowicz’s “Pornografia” (“Pornography”), and by the history of “adventures with time” (chronotope transformation) after 1945, described by Hans Urlich Gumbrecht. Gumprecht’s category of “presence” is also an important point of reference: Gorczyńska formulates a thesis that Różycki’s literary stylisations personalise the voice around which a real community of readers is being gathered.

Socialist realist literature is seen as a medium of ideology devoid of insight into emotional states. In his “Pamiątka z Celulozy” (“A Souvenir from the Cellulose Mill”), Igor Newerly examines a love affair that is aware of its cultural circumstances of emotionality. He depicts the emotional states as a part of social practices made up of the protagonists’ “I” and “we,” and places them into the existing political relations. It refers first and foremost to the proletariat, thus people living in extreme poverty. The novel includes criticism of the dominating in the 1950s forms of erotic love promoted by popular culture, showing alienation that is inseparable from them. Revolution consists in re-evaluation of the forms of emotionality. A change of the social context enables the pair of lovers to open to a broadly understood society and experience the relationship in autonomy. It involves not only the change in the perception of love and desire, but also of the then gender roles and patterns of erotic attractiveness.

The paper offers an interpretation of Witold Gombrowicz’s “Ślub” (“The Marriage”) as a meta-statement about the author’s vision of modernity. This thesis is supported by two further ones. Against the interpretive tradition, Sadzik points at the need of the drama’s historical specification that sees “The Marriage” as a record of “overdreamt revolution.” This problem axis offers the place for crystalising the metahistorical issues. Presenting the sequence of acts in “The Marriage” that corresponds to historical transformations of power and is linked to conversions of subjectivity models, Sadzik makes an attempt to redecipher the figure of Drunkard. He sees in this figure a modernity obstetrician, and at the same time an agent of other figure encoded in the drama, namely Hitler, against whom Gombrowicz directs the ethical turn that takes place in the final part of the play.

The paper is devoted to intertextual references between the texts by Witold Gombrowicz and by Jean-Paul Sartre. Gombrowicz himself suggested the precedence of “Ferdydurke” over the existential ideas included in “Nausea”. Bielecki in his article discusses the relations born between “Nausea” and “Kosmos” (“Cosmos”) both due to the intertextual dependencies that combine the two novels and owing to a similar formula of existential nihilism. The difference lies in that Sartre’s protagonist halts on the line of pessimism and disrelished condemnation, while Gombrowicz attempts to overcome the reactive stance and efforts to affirm the reality that is devoid of transcendental foundation.

The paper attempts to describe the politically and institutionally entangled intellectual group that developed in the 1930s in Warsaw around Stefan Żółkiewski. The analysis refers to a seminar model that consists in a dispersed way of working on the academic text. The main research material is a set of Żółkiewski’s treatises and of the figures he cooperated with, as well as archive materials. As based on them, Piotr Sidorowicz makes an effort to demonstrate the possible genesis of intellectual stance that in the 1960s lead to the birth of the concept of literary culture.

The paper examines the anagram in the three overlapping fields, namely a stylistic mode of expression, a quasi-genre, and Ferdinand de Saussure’s phonetic anagram. This description reaches for anagram history, traces its ancient sources and demonstrates its development in old literature, in surrealist texts and—in a broader sense—in modernist ones, and also includes into the scope of research the most recent pieces. The most vital part of the article is the one devoted to de Saussure’s anagrams. Adam Dziadek refers directly to the notes made by the Genevan linguist and stresses the significant role that the anagram theory played in the shaping of anagrammatic writing and modern text theory, as well as their connections with somatic aspects of poetic language.

The paper refers to Władysław Stanisław Reymont’s letters to Helena Chylińska written between 1896 and 1897, thus in the time of composing volume two of “Ziemia obiecana” (“The Promised Land”). Due to a mistake in the addressee’s name and scarcity of explications to the correspondence, this episode from Reymont’s life has been to this day undisclosed. New search queries made room for identification of the addressee together with most general sketch of her life, as well as for making a more detailed contexualisation of the information contained in the letters, including determination of the mentioned persons’ identities and tangibles of places and events.

The year 2024 witnesses 90 years from the passing of Aglauro Ungherini, a bookseller, alpinist, Mazzinist, but primarily a friend of Poland and a translator of most outstanding works of Polish Romantic literature. The paper depicts the multidimensional figure of Ungherini—a heavily biased, unassuming and self-respected man—and the origin of his translational activity. A 50 years correspondence with Władysław Mickiewicz, who assisted him with translations of the works by Adam Mickiewicz, Zygmunt Krasiński, Juliusz Słowacki, and other Polish Romantic poets, is an important thread of the study. Ungherini’s translational undertakings are viewed in the context of a wide social-political action taken by Italian polonophiles to regain independence by Poland.

The article discusses the contacts of Halina and Jerzy Wittlin with Bolesław Miciński, and later also with the latter’s wife Halina Micińska. The young Miciński greatly valued Wittlin as a translator of “Odyssey” and as a writer. In Wittlin’s view, Miciński was also a talented man of letters. The two poets met in Warsaw in the 1930s and continued their friendly relationship during the World War II (they stayed for some time in Lourdes) until Miciński’s passing. The sources presented in the article, especially 12 to this day unknown letters, shed new light on the lives of the writers, on some facts from postwar history of Halina Wittlin, Jerzy Wittlin, and Halina Micińska, and well as of a few other figures that remained close to Wittlin and Miciński. In the correspondence in question a special place is occupied by a rewritten letter by Halina Micińska’s anonymous niece that contains an utterly authentic and dramatic description of events from the Warsaw Uprising.

Unpublished private notes from Maria Kurecka’s archive, which, together with the archive of Witold Wirpsza, her husband, is treasured in Książnica Pomorska (Pomeranian Library) in Szczecin, are made subject of the article. The present study contains excerpts from a notebook entitled “Zapiski ze Szczecina” (“Notes from Szczecin”) composed between 1950 and 1952. The paper describes the figure of Kurecka, especially this period from her biography when she dwelled with Wirpsza in Szczecin. It also raises the issue of so-called literary settlement that took place in the capital of Western Pomerania in the first years after the World War II.

The reviewer analyses the edition of Aleksander Wat’s “Mój wiek” (“My Century”) issued in the series of “Biblioteka Narodowa” (“National Library”). He pays attention to the innovative character of the introduction, which is visible e.g. in the modification of the formula “life and work.” Additionally, Madejski reports on the model that Dziadek adopted to portray Wat’s work in the context of three genres, namely autobiography, memoir, and essay, as well as reminds of other modes of problematising “My Century”. Finally, he calls for a possibility to label a conversation (spoken book) a unique genre in our literary tradition.