Modalities of Polish Modernism
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Studies
- Introduction: The Periodization of Polish Literature
- The Periodization of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature to Date
- Young Poland (1890–1918)
- The Interwar Period, or the Second Polish Republic (1919–1939)
- The Second World War (1939–1945)
- Polish People’s Republic (PRL: 1945–1990)
- Periodization of the Polish People’s Republic’s Literature
- The Third Polish Republic
- Consequences
- Currents and Periods
- Émigré Literature and Modernism
- Emigration in the History of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature
- The Caesura of 1956
- Two Modernisms
- Modernism and Émigré Literature
- A Glance at the Twentieth-Century Polish Literature
- Modernism in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature: A Reconnaissance
- Modernism and the Traditions of Modernity
- The Concepts of Modernism in Poland: Selected Questions
- Kazimierz Wyka “Polish Modernism”
- The First Concept
- The Second Concept
- Jan Józef Lipski Concept of Modernism
- “Modernism Without Qualities”
- From Modernism (1890–1918) to Modernity (Since 1918)
- Artistic Criticism and the History of Art
- Problems with the Term
- Modernism in Poland: History and Chronology
- Problems with the Object
- The Dominant Features of Modernism in Polish Literature
- Symbolism
- Vitalism
- Essentialism
- Relationism
- Conventionalism
- Poeticity
- Constructivism
- Periodization
- An Introduction to the Draft Concept
- Impressionism in the Polish Modernist Prose: An Introduction
- Principium Individuationis: Nietzschean Motifs in Bruno Schulz’s Oeuvre
- Instead of the Conclusion
- Texts and Voices: The Questions of Modernist Poetics
- From Postmodernism to Modernism: Aleksander Wat – Another Experience
- Modality: Literary Studies and Cognitivism – A Reconnaissance
- Hypotheses
- Modality as a Question of Historical Poetics
- Modernist Currents
- Scientific Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century: An Introduction
- Modernist Currents in Poland
- Parnassianism
- The Decadent Movement
- Expressionism
- Aesthetics
- The Poetics
- The 1918 Expressionism
- Polemics: Przybyszewski – Strindberg – Irzykowski
- Point of Arrival
- Expressionism and Formism
- Expressionism After 1939
- Symbolism
- Futurism
- Futurism as Counterculture
- Polish Futurism as the Art of the Future
- The Futurist Concept of Modernity
- Futurism and Expressionism
- Futurism and Dadaism
- Futurism and Formism
- Futurism and Surrealism
- The Attitude Toward Futurism
- Paradoxes of Polish Futurism
- The Avant-Garde
- The Krakow Avant-Garde
- The Avant-Garde and Futurism in Poland: Differences
- The Avant-Garde and Constructivism
- The Avant-Garde and Surrealism
- Paradoxes of the Avant-Garde in Poland
- The Idea of Avant-Gardism
- Neoclassicism
- Catastrophism
- Two Modernist Motifs
- The City
- The Myth
- Modernism’s Literary Diagnoses
- Introduction
- Digressions
- Naturalism
- Reception of Western Literature
- Subjectivity in Narration
- Verse Novel
- Modern Novel: Aniela Gruszecka Concept
- The 1920s and the 1930s: The Differences
- Indicators of Early Modernist Prose
- “Guiding Intelligence”
- “Single Cause” Novel
- The “Mythical Method”
- Realism as Convention
- Realism versus Poeticity
- The Criticism of Social Stereotypes in Language
- “Private” Symbolism
- Other Characteristics
- Destructions of Mimetic Reality Representation: Schulz and Gombrowicz
- Analyses and Interpretations
- Uncovering the Unconscious
- Stanisław Przybyszewski: The Mystical mare tenebrarum
- A Precursor of Modern literature
- Metafiction of Early Modernism: Pałuba by Karol Irzykowski (1903)
- Verbalization of the Unconscious
- Project of a New Psychology
- Metafiction and Metanarration
- Pałuba (1903) and Ferdydurke (1937)
- Time and Chance
- Self-referentiality According to Ferdynand Goetel (From Day to Day, 1926)
- Time, Chance, and the Metaphysics of Morality: Straszny czwartek w domu pastora (1939) by Karol Ludwik Koniński
- From Strindberg to Happening
- The 1920s
- The Plot
- Metafiction
- Narration: A Chronicle of Simultaneity
- Composition: Added Meanings and Symbolism
- Variants of Modernism
- Functions of Memory
- Memory, Time, Consciousness: “The Maids of Wilko” by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1932)
- Memory, “Sickness unto Death,” Consciousness: The Impatient Ones by Zofia Nałkowska (1939)
- Other Modernities
- Genocide and the Beginnings of Modern Prose: Zofia Nałkowska Choucas (1925–1927)
- Choucas: A Polish Version of The Magic Mountain
- Modern Poetics
- Autobiographism and Anti-Fictionality
- The Limitation of Omniscience
- Novel – Journal – Notes
- Nationalism and Colonialism
- “One Nation Should Not Oppress Another”
- Difference, Otherness, Modern Sensitivity
- Was Witkacy an Antisemite? (Pożegnanie jesieni, 1926)
- A Part of a Bigger Whole
- “Jewess,” “Little Jew,” “Kike”
- “I Was Speaking about Poles as a Pole”
- Historical Prose of Mature Modernism: Wacław Berent’s Opowieści biograficzne (1934–1939)
- Document and Biography
- Modernization: The Modernists’ Subject
- Historiography as Writing
- The Poetics of a Modernist Biography
- Modernization and Multiculturality
- Forgetting and Anonymity
- From the Decadent Movement to Modernization
- Polemic with Nationalism
- Modernist Catastrophism
- Historical Prose of Mature Modernism
- Józef Mackiewicz Modernity
- From Stereotypes to Nationalist Myths
- Against Nationalisms
- Patriotism of Landscape
- The Country Idea
- Settling Accounts with the Twentieth Century
- Mackiewiczian Postcolonialism
- Anti-Modern Modernity: Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (1937/1938)
- Under Form’s Oppression
- Youth: A Myth of Modern Culture
- Discourses of Domination: Family, Social Structures
- Man Imprisoned Within Himself
- Imitation: Mechanisms of Form
- Linguistic Reality
- Modernist Aphoristic Style
- Authorial Narration
- Mackiewicz and Gombrowicz
- Mythization of Reality: Bruno Schulz’s Concept of Literature
- Modernist Initiations: The Case of Czesław Miłosz
- The Consequences of Stalinism: The Captive Mind (1953)
- The Emptiness
- The Absurd
- The Necessity
- The Success
- The Book of Rebels: The Issa Valley (1955)
- Poetics
- Realism
- Symbolic World
- Autobiography Concealed
- A Novel of Initiation
- Annex
- Postcolonialism versus Modernism
- Wisława Szymborska and Modernism
- Experience and Modernism
- From Ancient to Modernist Grotesque: History, Terminology, and Phenomenon
- Definitional Challenges
- The Term
- Hybrids
- Motifs
- Hyperbole, Caricature, Monsters
- Gothicism
- Grotesque in the Nineteenth Century
- Early Modernist Grotesque (Young Poland)
- Mythological Grotesque
- Medieval Grotesque
- Commedia dell’arte Motifs
- Fantastic Grotesque
- Repeated and Violated Conventions
- Felicjan Faleński
- Jan Lemański
- Adolf Nowaczyński
- Roman Jaworski
- Early Modernism: Summary
- Forgotten Language: Grotesque and the Avant-Garde
- Jaworski – Witkacy
- Schulz – Leśmian – Gombrowicz (and others)
- Aleksander Wat
- The Warsaw Faust of 1919
- Late Modernist Grotesque: Introduction
- List of Abbreviations
- Bibliography
- Note about Bibliography
- Index of Names
Modalities of Polish Modernism
Translated by Grupa Mowa
Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford
Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bolecki, Włodzimierz author | Grupa Mowa translator
Title: Modalities of Polish modernism / Włodzimierz Bolecki ; translated by Grupa Mowa.
Other titles: Modalnosci modernizmu. English
Description: Berlin ; New York : Peter Lang, 2025. |
Series: Polish studies - transdisciplinary perspectives, 2191-3293 ; vol. 47 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2025019349 (print) | LCCN 2025019350 (ebook) | ISBN 9783631913840 hardback | ISBN 9783631940112 pdf | ISBN 9783631940686 epub
Subjects: LCSH: Polish literature--20th century--History and criticism | Modernism (Literature)--Poland | LCGFT: Literary criticism
Classification: LCC PG7053.M6 B6513 2025 (print) | LCC PG7053.M6 (ebook) | DDC 891.8/509112--dc23/eng/20250614
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025019349
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025019350
Cover illustration: Courtesy of Benjamin Ben Chaim
Project funded from the state budget, allocated by the Minister of Education and Science of the Republic of Poland as a part of the National Program for the Development of Humanities (project no. NPRH/U21/SP/0171/202/12).
The Polish edition of this work was first published in 2012 by Instytut Badań Literackich and Fundacja Akademia Humanistyczna, Warsaw, Poland.
ISSN 2191-3293
ISBN 978-3-631-91384-0 (Print)
ISBN 978-3-631-94011-2 (E-PDF)
ISBN 978-3-631-94068-6 (E-PUB)
DOI 10.3726/b23046
© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne (Switzerland)
Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin (Germany)
All rights reserved.
All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilization outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Periodization of Polish Literature
The Periodization of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature to Date
The Interwar Period, or the Second Polish Republic (1919–1939)
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Polish People’s Republic (PRL: 1945–1990)
Periodization of the Polish People’s Republic’s Literature
Émigré Literature and Modernism
Emigration in the History of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature
Modernism and Émigré Literature
A Glance at the Twentieth-Century Polish Literature
Modernism in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature: A Reconnaissance
Modernism and the Traditions of Modernity
The Concepts of Modernism in Poland: Selected Questions
Kazimierz Wyka “Polish Modernism”
Jan Józef Lipski Concept of Modernism
From Modernism (1890–1918) to Modernity (Since 1918)
Artistic Criticism and the History of Art
Modernism in Poland: History and Chronology
The Dominant Features of Modernism in Polish Literature
An Introduction to the Draft Concept
Impressionism in the Polish Modernist Prose: An Introduction
Principium Individuationis: Nietzschean Motifs in Bruno Schulz’s Oeuvre
Texts and Voices: The Questions of Modernist Poetics
From Postmodernism to Modernism: Aleksander Wat – Another Experience
Modality: Literary Studies and Cognitivism – A Reconnaissance
Modality as a Question of Historical Poetics
Scientific Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century: An Introduction
Polemics: Przybyszewski – Strindberg – Irzykowski
Polish Futurism as the Art of the Future
The Futurist Concept of Modernity
The Avant-Garde and Futurism in Poland: Differences
The Avant-Garde and Constructivism
The Avant-Garde and Surrealism
Paradoxes of the Avant-Garde in Poland
Modernism’s Literary Diagnoses
Reception of Western Literature
Modern Novel: Aniela Gruszecka Concept
The 1920s and the 1930s: The Differences
Indicators of Early Modernist Prose
The Criticism of Social Stereotypes in Language
Destructions of Mimetic Reality Representation: Schulz and Gombrowicz
Stanisław Przybyszewski: The Mystical mare tenebrarum
A Precursor of Modern literature
Metafiction of Early Modernism: Pałuba by Karol Irzykowski (1903)
Verbalization of the Unconscious
Pałuba (1903) and Ferdydurke (1937)
Self-referentiality According to Ferdynand Goetel (From Day to Day, 1926)
Narration: A Chronicle of Simultaneity
Composition: Added Meanings and Symbolism
Memory, Time, Consciousness: “The Maids of Wilko” by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1932)
Memory, “Sickness unto Death,” Consciousness: The Impatient Ones by Zofia Nałkowska (1939)
Genocide and the Beginnings of Modern Prose: Zofia Nałkowska Choucas (1925–1927)
Choucas: A Polish Version of The Magic Mountain
Autobiographism and Anti-Fictionality
“One Nation Should Not Oppress Another”
Difference, Otherness, Modern Sensitivity
Was Witkacy an Antisemite? (Pożegnanie jesieni, 1926)
“Jewess,” “Little Jew,” “Kike”
“I Was Speaking about Poles as a Pole”
Historical Prose of Mature Modernism: Wacław Berent’s Opowieści biograficzne (1934–1939)
Modernization: The Modernists’ Subject
The Poetics of a Modernist Biography
Modernization and Multiculturality
From the Decadent Movement to Modernization
Historical Prose of Mature Modernism
From Stereotypes to Nationalist Myths
Settling Accounts with the Twentieth Century
Anti-Modern Modernity: Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (1937/1938)
Youth: A Myth of Modern Culture
Discourses of Domination: Family, Social Structures
Mythization of Reality: Bruno Schulz’s Concept of Literature
Modernist Initiations: The Case of Czesław Miłosz
The Consequences of Stalinism: The Captive Mind (1953)
The Book of Rebels: The Issa Valley (1955)
Postcolonialism versus Modernism
Wisława Szymborska and Modernism
From Ancient to Modernist Grotesque: History, Terminology, and Phenomenon
Hyperbole, Caricature, Monsters
Grotesque in the Nineteenth Century
Early Modernist Grotesque (Young Poland)
Repeated and Violated Conventions
Forgotten Language: Grotesque and the Avant-Garde
Schulz – Leśmian – Gombrowicz (and others)
Foreword
This book tackles selected issues of modernism in twentieth-century Polish literature. As the topic is vast, my analysis focuses almost exclusively on the first half of that century, approximately until 1939.
I began my work on the matter at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I wished to devise a concept of modernism in Polish literature which I could extend to cover the literary phenomena of the entire twentieth century. However, that period offered few publications to consult; I describe them in the first part of this book. The idea itself seemed far from trendy at the time, because the literary scholars of recent decades – especially those from the younger generation – focus on postmodernism. However, I have always thought that studies on postmodernism in Polish literature, however we may understand the term itself, must relate to an earlier formation, namely to a precisely formulated concept of modernism.1 And no such concept had emerged in Poland. Today, the situation is different: many scholars have published works which refer to “modernism” in the broad, Anglo-Saxon sense. Although usually serving as a catchword, thus employed term does not seem to elicit substantial objections.2
Despite certain reservations, Poland has accepted “modernism” in the sense in which the term has functioned in Western humanities for decades. The word has even appeared in the names of university departments dedicated to twentieth-century Polish literature. But apart from using labels such as “the broad meaning of modernism,” the situation has failed to produce any new, truly extensive studies on the history of literature which we could compare with the scope and depth of the studies on Polish Enlightenment, the nineteenth century, or the Old Polish period.
However, the reflections on the new meaning of modernism highlighted the continuity of the Polish literary phenomena in the entire twentieth century, which remains divided in the period-based concept of literary history. Another positive result was the attempt to introduce other terms, such as “modern literature” or “twentieth-century literature.” Therefore, the hero of my book is “modernism” as a term and a phenomenon. Besides proving definitely superior to all the other concepts, modernism boasts the richest source literature of hundreds or even thousands of publications in different languages. Moreover, it serves as a fundamental term in the popular history of twentieth-century literature. When writing the articles included in this book, I delved into various contradictions and difficulties, several of which deserve a mention.
First, modernism in Poland remains undescribed as a holistic phenomenon. Scholars have produced numerous analytical and interpretative works – sometimes profound and excellent but still limited to individual names rather than focused on phenomena. Consequently, a scholar of modernism in Poland as a holistic cultural formation has access to few works which they could consult. By contrast, scholars of Western European or American modernism enjoy hundreds of analyses of modernism in almost every domain of art, literature, culture, social life, politics, or the media. Moreover, those scholars have access to studies of historical relations, such as those between modernism and romanticism,3 modernism and Enlightenment,4 or modernism and postmodernism. On top of that, they can consult anthologies of source texts and guidebooks explaining how to navigate this enormous and complicated library of texts, which comprises paper and online publications, books and magazines, and archives and museums.5
Today, this abundance and variety of ways to describe modernism creates an incredibly rich context allowing for a free choice of a research perspective, analyzed issues, or tools, and for an epistemically fruitful confrontation of methodological and interpretative proposals. Without such richness of research and the reference books necessary for effective study, analyses of modernism in Poland remain condemned to segmentation and a single perspective. Above all, Poland lacks important discussions allowing scholars to separate the wheat from the chaff, namely to distinguish original works from derivative and imitative ones – often random, unimportant, and deprived of a broader source foundation.
The second contradiction – a result of the first one – stemmed from the difficulty in separating, and sometimes choosing between, the issues of modernism and the issues of literary history. The discourse on modernism concerns various aspects of the literary history discourse on twentieth-century literature. While the former aims to reconstruct the determinants and dynamics of modernism, the latter must encompass all the events, phenomena, and facts, which often prove unimportant for modernism but remain substantial for literary life. However, both discourses are strictly interdependent despite the different subjects and aims.
An analysis of modernism requires employing the original historical context. But any reconstruction of the popular history of twentieth-century literature which excludes the category of modernism leads to mechanical enumerations and divisions, without providing any common perspective. Therefore, I try to reconcile these two views in my book, albeit with a varying degree of focus.
The third problem was that I wrote about modernism in Poland on different occasions, for different readers, and with different goals in mind. Consequently, this book constantly “changes the focal length,” meaning the perspective of analyzing the phenomena of modernism. Alongside studies addressed to a very narrow group of specialists, my book includes university lectures, text interpretations, analyses, syntheses, popular science reviews, theoretical academic discourse, and essayistic reflections.
However, the most considerable difficulty was to develop such an understanding of modernism in Poland which would prove recognizable in all parts of this book regardless of their subject or degree of detail. Anticipating the reflections contained in the book’s chapters, I must formulate them here as several theses.
First, in my opinion, there was no single modernism as a phenomenon, which is why I use the term “modernism” as a plurale tantum. In this book, “modernism” always denotes a collection of modernisms – a configuration of constantly dialoguing, contradictory, and mutually exclusive tendencies, phenomena, programs, and stances, each of which aspires to become the determinant of modernism (sic). Most of them were polar opposites, such as the pursuit of universality and local character; the cultivation of tradition and national identities with the simultaneous interest in multiculturality; the praise for the city’s civilization beside the cult of nature and rusticity; or the interest in radical subjectivism and the psychology of an individual, whereas social psychology focused on the attitudes and fates of communities, groups, and families (hence the popularity of sagas). From the very beginning, modernism has contained a strong current linked to the emancipation of women, whose origins significantly differ from today’s feminism.6 Moreover, modernism has always displayed interest in otherness, disparateness, transgression, borderline phenomena, and things which transcend the stable social norms regarding aesthetics or morality.
In other words, my concept of modernism does not signify a single proposal, determinant, or phenomenon. Instead, I offer a dense network of relations created by contradictory, often mutually exclusive responses to the questions about the essence and consequences of modernity. In this sense, modernism is an analysis and critique – including self-critique – of modernity. As the name of a phenomenon, modernism comprises a polyphony of oppositional concepts, programs, and values, together with their realizations.
Second, there is no single modernism in the world either: like any cultural phenomenon, modernism emerged and developed within different social, historical, cultural, political, and religious traditions. Consequently, many aspects of Central/Eastern European modernism – in which I include modernism in Poland – substantially differ from Anglo-Saxon modernism and its variants.7
Third, there is no single modernism in literature, because writers experienced and defined modernity in various ways and drew different conclusions from these experiences depending on the period; this also pertained to basic artistic matters. Besides, modernism concerned literariness only to a small extent and thus transgressed the boundaries of literariness in literature. Modernism in literature is hardly a matter of convention, language, manifestos, or theories – the focus of most Polish works in literary studies. Instead, we encounter a collection of different phenomena of the entire culture and social life from at least mid-1800s – and in a broader perspective, from the Renaissance. Literature is a testimony of seeking multiple answers, which usually lead into areas beyond literature itself or even question the very existence of literature. Consequently, we cannot describe the “modernist nature” of literature by indicating only one type of modernism determinants, because many of them existed and often proved mutually exclusive; moreover, each had its own, diverse variations. Thus, my fundamental effort does not aim to fit Polish literary phenomena into some abstract formula of modernism in general – and this very method has spread over the majority of Polish works on literary history. Instead, I strive to indicate the languages which allow us to describe the specific character of modernism in Poland.
Almost all Polish authors avoid qualifying the “nationality” of modernism like a plague and treat this formation (modernism) solely as a name for universal or at least pan-European phenomena. This perspective proves justified or even necessary when we approach general, metahistorical, or comparative aspects – crucial for the multilingual culture of Central Europe. But in practice, such an approach usually produces mechanical shifts from general issues to interpretations of Polish literary phenomena, which serve as simple illustrations of modernism as a common phenomenon. Thus, it comes as no surprise that synthetic, comparative analyses of this formation omit modernism in Poland on their long lists of national literary modernisms.
An equally frequent approach is the mechanical description of Polish texts using languages developed for interpreting other national modernisms – usually the American and British ones. In addition to the methodological deficiencies of such works, we should note that modern studies on the historical variants of modernism concern primarily national or regional modernisms – for example Austrian modernism during the Habsburg monarchy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We find entire libraries on English,8 Scandinavian (separately for each country),9 Italian, Greek, German,10 American, Portuguese, Brazilian, Russian, and even Catalan modernism, each of them presented in its “local” specificity and varieties.11 My book adopts the same perspective. Modernism remains an international – European and American – phenomenon, but its local determinants, issues, and interpretations stem from national cultural, linguistic, and artistic traditions, and from their transnational, regional, and multicultural contexts. The best example is the Vienna Secession, which radiated northward and eastward to Kyiv, Saint Petersburg, or Moscow, and southward to Ljubljana, Zagreb, or Triest, with a rich presence in the broadly defined center of that region.
Details
- Pages
- 572
- Publication Year
- 2025
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631940112
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631940686
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631913840
- DOI
- 10.3726/b23046
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2025 (December)
- Keywords
- Twentieth-century Polish literature Eastern European Modernism Modernism Modernity in Polish literature
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- Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2025. 572 pp.
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Biographical notes
Włodzimierz Bolecki (Author)
Włodzimierz Bolecki is Professor Emeritus of Polish Literature who specializes in historical poetics, twentieth-century literary history, Polish émigré literature, theory and history of narrative forms, intertextuality, literary communication, methodology of literary studies, modernism, and postmodernism.
