Search Results

There is a very broad tradition of the Vita Adae in medieval German in prose (as part of Historienbibeln and chronicles, and in a late text by Hans Folz), and in verse either independently or within rhymed chronicles. There is an extensive Old Testament poem by Lutwin including the apocryphal material, and the narrative influenced major literary works like Hartmann's Gregorius. There are some late folk plays recorded in the 19th century. Prose versions are known in Dutch. Although there is a separate Slavonic tradition of Adam legends, there are translations of the Latin text in Hungarian, Croatian, Bohemian, and Polish, sometimes in 16th-century printed books. The material was adapted into other works, including books about devils. One of the latter was translated from Polish into Russian.

This chapter explores Jewish contributions to Polish literature in the period between the two world wars. This literary activity mirrored social and cultural processes, such as the democratization of the Polish intelligentsia, with its absorption of members from the middle class, and the acculturation and linguistic Polonization of various Jewish groups. The literary question thus became a symbol of the new — and for the most part complex and difficult — relationship between Poles and Jews. It is not a coincidence that the two groups especially involved in the discussion were acculturated Jews and Polish nationalists. The views of these two groups set the parameters for description, interpretation, and evaluation of the literature to which all other participants had little choice but to conform. In general terms, their discussion ranged from acceptance of Jewish literature in non-Jewish languages as a contribution to world literature to treating it as an infiltration of the host culture; from description of the emerging literary group to examination of literary texts for the national or racial traits that were assumed to appear in them. In the space between these polarities there was room for a whole range of intermediate views.

This chapter focuses on Polish–Jewish relations and the January uprising. The memory of the pro-Polish orientation of the Jews in the January uprising remained alive throughout the 19th and in the early 20th centuries. The legend of patriotic ‘Poles of Mosaic faith’, which crystallized in the 1860s as a part of a broader romantic myth, gained a lasting place in literary tradition. The positive evaluation of the Jewish role generally remained artistically and ideologically rooted in the traditional romantic worldview. From that point of view, many later works can be seen as fossils of Polish romanticism. As the character of Polish–Jewish relations deteriorated, the Jewish legend of 1863 was continually revised in retrospect and it evolved in an increasingly negative fashion. Projecting new problems upon the past, Polish literature of the realist and modernist periods emphasized the economic aspect of Polish–Jewish relations and portrayed Jewish political loyalties with growing ambivalence. Echoing complex structural changes in post-insurrectionary Polish society as a whole, changes which brought about the revision of the larger myth of 1863, the evolution of its Jewish aspect followed closely the course of the debate on the so-called ‘Jewish question’.

This chapter explores Chone Shmeruk's The Esterke Story in Yiddish and Polish Literature (1985). This book focuses on the Esterke story, which concerns Casimir the Great's Jewish mistress called Ester (Esterke, Esterka). The story of Esterka was a very flexible legend. It was first used by Poles to condemn the privileges granted by Casimir to the Jews; later, it became a symbol for the possibility of amicable understanding between the two people and even measured assimilation. For the Jews, Yiddish literature came to see it as the self-sacrifice made by a Jewess to improve the lot of the Jews. It was viewed in this literature as indicative of Jewish success, but also disillusionment or even betrayal.

This chapter examines Karin Wolff's invaluable and successful anthology of poetry and prose, entitled Hiob 1943. A Requiem for the Warsaw ghetto. The anthology contains 50 literary texts and accounts by authors of all ages, Poles and Polish Jews, including texts by people who did not manage to survive the war. There are also prominent pieces by universally acclaimed writers of the older and middle generation. Karin Wolff, a translator of great merit of Polish literature into German, a German in her middle age living in the German Democratic Republic, has contributed greatly to familiarizing East German readers with Polish writing on the experiences of Poles and Jews during the war and the occupation of 1939–1945. Her work was recognized and rewarded in 1981 when she was given the Polish Pen Club annual award for the most outstanding translator of works from Polish into another language.

This chapter explores Stranger in our Midst, a book examining Jewish characters and topics in Polish literature. It is an anthology which tries to give a balanced picture by including works both sympathetic and hostile to Jews. The chapter considers whether or not it succeeds in that endeavour. In creating such an anthology an editor has two choices: either to attempt a diachronic cross-section through each literary period, a complicated historical–literary procedure requiring thorough research into both literature and its social and other backgrounds, or else to reconstruct a comprehensive contemporary image based on the literary canon and including the most important works and authors, as found in standard literary histories and in school reading lists. Harold B. Segel follows neither of these strategies and his selection appears largely accidental.

This chapter addresses the role Virginia Woolf plays in contemporary Polish literature, examining the significance of her modernist legacy – as a vital part of planetary feminism – to Polish feminist fiction. Though Woolf entered Polish culture in the 1920s and her hybrid fictional forms were translated in the 1950-60s, her reception was delayed. Feminist rewritings of Woolf’s oeuvre began to emerge after the first Polish translations of Orlando (1994) and A Room of One’s Own (1997), followed by her auto/biographical writings. Polish writers – Joanna Bator, Sylwia Chutnik, Marta Konarzewska, Renata Lis, Izabela Morska, Maria Nurowska, and Olga Tokarczuk – transform, rewrite and re-use Woolf’s works in Central European cultural contexts. The most visible signs of Woolf’s ‘afterlives’ are transtextual relations between contemporary fiction, biographies of Woolf and her oeuvre. This chapter explores biofiction with Woolfian themes and intertextual echoes that enhance polyphonic effects. It also focuses on hypertextuality by analysing the functions of Woolfian hypotexts, for instance, tracing back the generic fusing of the Nobel Prize Laureate Tokarczuk’s ‘constellation novels’ to Woolf’s hybrid fictional forms. The chapter applies Jessica Berman’s ‘trans critical optic’ that allows to read Polish textual dialogues with Woolf from transdisciplinary, transnational and transgender perspectives.

This chapter examines how the generation born about 1910 found propitious conditions for the creation of a ‘Jewish school’ of Polish literature. Life, including their most inner life, was lived through the Polish language. Yet this life was marked by unexpectedly strong Jewish features. Jews had certainly made themselves felt in Polish literature much earlier. Already at the turn of the century, writers of Jewish descent played an important role in the intellectual elite. Their role was to increase considerably in independent Poland. However, those who desired assimilation had to abide by the tacit understanding that they were not to explore their Jewish experience, at least not in their literature. Thus, the first intellectuals to surface as identifiably Jewish in their work were critics and historians; then came poets. Yet prose writers were significantly absent. Novelists base the substance of their work on their life experience, particularly the experience of youth; the Polonized Jews preferred to leave their past in the dark.

This chapter details an interview with Czesław Miłosz on translating the Bible into Polish, which was conducted by Ewa Czarnecka. Czarnecka observes that a growing interest in the sphere of sacrum can be observed in Miłosz's poetry, a passage from history to metaphysics. On the other hand, Miłosz stresses his obligations to Polish literature, in the sense of strengthening it as a language of dignity and hierarchy, an end that the translation of the Book of Psalms should serve. Meanwhile, Miłosz explains that one of the basic problems one encounters in translating the psalms is that there are words which have no exact equivalent in the modern languages. The trick is to find the Polish language's specific register where its rhythmic consistency, its expressive power can be put to use. The point is to find the specific laws of the Polish language.

In contrast to the image of the haidamak, the figure of Khmelnytsky barely registers in Polish romantic literature. This is a function of the open-ended nature of the Polish-Cossack conflict and the ambiguous nature of the hetman himself. When he appears, it is most often in melodramatic fashion, as an indignant but proud Cossack bent on avenging the seizure of his estate and abduction of his wife by the Polish gentryman Czapliński. This image draws heavily on Polish romantic historians’ attempt to explain the causes of the 1648 rebellion. This episode is also the basis of the fullest treatment of Khmelnytsky in Polish literature, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel With Fire and Sword, where it is reconfigured as the story of Bohun and Helena. The reconfiguration and ostensible resolution of this subplot allows Polish literature to finally succeed in narrativizing the Khmelnyystky uprising as a comforting allegory.

This chapter addresses David Weinfeld's anthology Hebrew Poetry in Poland between the Two World Wars (1997). This anthology includes two dozen Hebrew poets and is valuable if only from a historical viewpoint as most of these poets are forgotten and their works are mostly unavailable. Weinfeld includes biographical details on each writer and a ninety-two-page introduction to the social and historical background, with sections on the most important of the poets, Yitzhak Katznelson (better known as a Yiddish poet), Matityahu Shoham, and especially Berl Pomerantz. However, most of the poems, Weinfeld concedes, are of limited artistic interest. This poetry is inadvertently a tombstone for Polish Hebrew literature and, indeed, for Polish Jewry. About half the poets died in the Holocaust.

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. Gombrowicz was a Polish writer who did not care much for Polish literature; a modernist who derided most of the major currents of modernity; and a skeptical, ironic mind with deep moralistic inclinations. In his three-volume Diary, considered by many his most accomplished work, Gombrowicz advanced a theory that Polish writers are individuals only in a superficial sense. They are, in fact, social institutions “inhibited by something impersonal, superior, inter-human, and collective emanating from the milieu...Polish thought, Polish mythology, the Polish psyche.”

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish novelist, film director, and screenwriter Tadeusz Konwicki. Konwicki successfully captured the uncanny mood of the final years of communism in his novels and his nonfiction writing. The system in his novels appears less as a coercive tyranny than as a black hole warping and demeaning every dream and desire.

In recent years, the popularity of Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre has substantially increased in Poland. There has been little prior attempt to explain this phenomenon, although it could be beneficial to comparative literature and feminist studies. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to examine the significance of Virginia Woolf’s legacy to contemporary Polish culture, as well as the possible causes of the “Woolf’s Renaissance”. As Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga has pointed out, until the late 1980s., Woolf remained relatively unknown and perceived as a minor modernist writer. Yet, the third phase of her reception (1990s-present) has brought a significant change, which finally led to the outburst of translations and popularity of Woolf’s works. One result of this “Woolf’s Renaissance” is the influence of Woolf’s legacy on contemporary literature and feminism in Poland. Woolf’s imaginairum has inspired many women writers, such as Joanna Bator, Sylwia Chutnik, Izabela Morska, and Maria Nurowska. It would seem that the popularity of Woolf among Polish women intellectuals stems from the similarity between her opposition to Victorian patriarchal society and their resistance against the radical Catholic conservatism and nationalism in Poland. Besides, the polyphony of Woolf’s oeuvre and the complexity of her biography invite the writers to enter the intertextual dialogue with the author.

The introduction to this edited collection on the historical novel Quo vadis: A Narrative of the Time of Nero explores the initial cultural context of the novel’s publication in 1896 and its reception in Poland as an astounding work of high literature. It also summarizes how the novel written by Henryk Sienkiewicz came to cross national boundaries, cultural categories, and media to gain a long and rich afterlife in the popular culture of Western Europe and the United States. The introduction considers the novel and its afterlife as an exceptional example of the reception of classical antiquity. The introduction explores how the historical novel provided a powerful discursive structure through which to explore Christian faith and resistance to tyranny. It also argues that analysis of Quo vadis and its multimedial transformations decentres the West and elite culture as sites of classical reception, reveals the particularities and the influence of the Polish classical tradition, and demonstrates how and why classics and popular culture converge.

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Bruno Schulz. Schulz was the author of two slim volumes of dreamlike prose that have been hailed as one of the most original achievements of Polish literature in the twentieth century. He is described as a profoundly unhappy man, whose most acute despondency seemed to have coincided with the beginning of his literary career and the praise with which his work was greeted by most prominent literary voices of his day. He may have become a victim of his own imagination, which trapped him in an invented world that was beginning to lose its magic.

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski. Herling was one of the cofounders and coeditors of the legendary Paris-based Polish magazine Kultura, which, during the communist decades, served as the forum of Polish free intellectual life. He also kept a highly personal, subtle, meditative diary, which was published during his lifetime as The Journal Written at Night. Next to Gombrowicz's Diary, it is considered one of the greatest examples of Polish memoirist literature.

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. Herbert is credited with almost singlehandedly introducing a whole new poetic idiom and changing the literary sensibility of Polish readers who matured in the turbulent sixties and seventies. It was for this younger group of readers, spared the experience of World War II and the worst excesses of Stalinism, that Herbert's writing became “a prayer of the generation.”