Gwido Zlatkes
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- February 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781874774051
- eISBN:
- 9781800340688
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781874774051.003.0038
- Subject:
- Religion, Judaism
This chapter describes Tomas Venclova's Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast. Aleksander Wat was much more than a prominent Polish poet of Jewish origin; he was a paradigmatic ...
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This chapter describes Tomas Venclova's Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast. Aleksander Wat was much more than a prominent Polish poet of Jewish origin; he was a paradigmatic twentieth-century intellectual who claimed an illustrious cultural lineage that included King David, Rashi, and Isaac Luria. A ‘born futurist’, he was also a communist fellow traveller in inter-war Poland, one who later became a Soviet prisoner, and on his return to Poland was an open anti-communist. Both his background and experiences placed him at the centre of major artistic currents and historical trends. Thus, in his writings one can find a reflection of virtually everything important that occurred in Europe between 1914 and his death in 1967 and even after.Less
This chapter describes Tomas Venclova's Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast. Aleksander Wat was much more than a prominent Polish poet of Jewish origin; he was a paradigmatic twentieth-century intellectual who claimed an illustrious cultural lineage that included King David, Rashi, and Isaac Luria. A ‘born futurist’, he was also a communist fellow traveller in inter-war Poland, one who later became a Soviet prisoner, and on his return to Poland was an open anti-communist. Both his background and experiences placed him at the centre of major artistic currents and historical trends. Thus, in his writings one can find a reflection of virtually everything important that occurred in Europe between 1914 and his death in 1967 and even after.
