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The Holy Roman Empire and Beyond

Brian Murdoch

in The Apocryphal Adam and Eve in Medieval Europe: Vernacular Translations and Adaptations of the Vita Adae et Evae

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 ... More

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.Less

The Image of Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Polish Romanticism and Its Post-Romantic Reflex

Roman Koropeckyj

in Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising

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 ... More

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.Less

Witold Gombrowicz: The Trabsforming Self

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

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 ... More

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.”Less

Tadeusz Konwicki: Polish Endgame

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

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 ... More

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.Less

Woolf’s Imaginarium: Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Legacy to Contemporary Polish Culture

Paulina Pająk

in Virginia Woolf and Heritage

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 ... More

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.Less

Lem Redux: From Poland to the World

Waclaw M. Osadnik and Peter Swirski

in Lemography: Stanislaw Lem in the Eyes of the World

This chapter situates Stanlislaw Lem’s life in the sociopolitical context of post-WW2 Poland in parallel to situating his writing career in the context of post-WW2 Polish literature. It then moves to ... More

This chapter situates Stanlislaw Lem’s life in the sociopolitical context of post-WW2 Poland in parallel to situating his writing career in the context of post-WW2 Polish literature. It then moves to place Lem in the global context, from the critical reception to the myriad tributes and accolades accrued during his lifetime as well as posthumously.Less

Bruno Schulz: The Prisoner of Myth

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

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 ... More

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.Less

Zbigniew Herbert: The Darkness of Mr. Cogito

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

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 ... More

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.”Less

Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski: Sleepless in Naple

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

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, ... More

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.Less

Adam Zagajewski: To Hear the Sound of Everything

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Adam Zagajewski. Zagajewski belongs to Poland's Solidarity generation—a particular breed of tough, down-to-earth dreamers and pragmatic ... More

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Adam Zagajewski. Zagajewski belongs to Poland's Solidarity generation—a particular breed of tough, down-to-earth dreamers and pragmatic romantics born at the end of or right after World War II who made ironic defiance their weapon of choice against totalitarian, ideological rant.Less

Preamble

in Memoirs of a Grandmother: Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews of Russia in the Nineteenth Century, Volume One

In this preamble, Pauline Wengeroff reflects on the experiences and observations that she recorded in her memoirs. She remembers a joyful, worry-free childhood in her parents' home, followed by ... More

In this preamble, Pauline Wengeroff reflects on the experiences and observations that she recorded in her memoirs. She remembers a joyful, worry-free childhood in her parents' home, followed by sorrow and happiness in the lives of the Jews in Russia, and events in her own home. Wengeroff's memoirs chronicle the more important events and cultural transformation of Jewish society in Lithuania during the 1840s and 1950s, a transformation that also affected her. Born in the early part of the 1830s in the Lithuanian city of Bobruisk, Wengeroff was raised by very religious, spiritually refined, and noble parents. Children during the period devoted their time to learning German and Polish literature, and to studying the Bible and the prophets, something that only made them proud of their religion and tradition and connected them closely to their people.Less

Czeslaw Milosz: A Testament of Exile

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Born in 1911, Milosz had seen it all: genocidal wars, revolutions, whole countries violently erased or slowly fading from the ... More

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Born in 1911, Milosz had seen it all: genocidal wars, revolutions, whole countries violently erased or slowly fading from the map, and the rise and ebb of ideologies, philosophies, religions. His writing, especially his poetry, may be viewed as an attempt to reclaim the innocent ability to wonder and trust. One of the best examples is his early cycle of short poems “The World,” written during the war, which recreated the secure and radiant world of a child.Less

Wislawa Szymborska: The Power of Preserving

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. With a literary career spanning more than fifty years, she ... More

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. With a literary career spanning more than fifty years, she acknowledges only some two hundred of her poems collected in several slender volumes. Her body of work displays unusual diversity and polychromy, and defies all the usual terms (classicist, linguistic, moralist) used to classify Polish writers of her generation. She practices isolation both in her writing and in her life, avoiding autobiography and remaining intensely private.Less

Modernist Night: Distortion, Regression, and Oblivion in the Fiction of Bruno Schulz

Henry Sussman

in Idylls of the Wanderer: Outside in Literature and Theory

This chapter examines the presentation of modernist night in the novels of Polish writer Bruno Schulz. It explains that Schulz conjures up this modernist night in order ... More

This chapter examines the presentation of modernist night in the novels of Polish writer Bruno Schulz. It explains that Schulz conjures up this modernist night in order illustrate the temporal anomalies of narrative art and to assemble a catalog or stamp album of the developments in 20th century culture that he witnesses from the perspective of Polish “minor literature”. His discourse provides early 20th century Western culture the retrospect that the character of Father Jacob achieves through incarceration in Schulz's Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass.Less

Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz: Modernism to Madness

Jaroslaw Anders (ed.)

in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. His book Insatiability is considered one of the classics of European modernism. Witkiewicz has remained a ... More

This chapter describes the life and works of Polish writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz. His book Insatiability is considered one of the classics of European modernism. Witkiewicz has remained a mystery to interpreters of his writing and his life. Was he a “metaphysical dandy” and an epigone of nineteenth-century decadence? Or a forerunner of today's radical irony? Or was he, like the hero of Insatiability, a lunatic slowly sinking into incoherence?Less