Emil Szramek, Jan Kudera, Konstanty Prus - pierwsze pokolenie badaczy śląskiego regionalizmu literackiego

Abstract

Priest Jan Kudera, Konstanty Prus and priest Emil Szramek made the foundation of the present day scientific reflections regarding not only written works but also other manifestations of culture life in the Silesian region. It was them who first determined the area of research as well as indicated the tools which could have been used. Of those three intellectuals only some works of priest Emil Szramek became well known, were analysed and the synthesis of them made thanks to the procedure of beatification of this priest. Only short articles were published about the priest. J. Kudera and K. Prus - one of the reasons for it was simply lack of synthetic research on dealing with history criticism on writing in general and on literature of the time in Silesia. Wincenty Ogrodziński, Tadeusz Mikulski, Zdzisław Hierowski, Krystyna Heska-Kwaśniewicz pointed to this fact and worked out subsequent states and showing to the needs of research on Silesian literature. Unfortunately, suggestions of publishing an anthology of the texts written by the scientists starting with priest Emil Szramek, priest Jan Kudera, Konstanty Prus along with Wincenty Ogrodziński, Alfred Jesionowski, Paweł Musioł, Ludwik Brożek, and Zdzisław Hierowski to finish with their contemporary intellectuals had never been accomplished. This book is an attempt to fill the gap in the research on the Silesian writings. Because of great variety of topics among E. Szramek’s, J. Kudera’s and K. Prus’ works the author concentrated mainly on those of biographic character. Their analysis, taking also into consideration some properties of para-literary nature enabled reconstruction of some methodological assumptions and showing the unique features and values of meaningful significance. This work consists of three basic parts devoted to the susequent Silesian research workers; each starts with biographical chapter introducing the character of a given regional artist indicating and stressing such moments and events in their life which, according to Kazimierz Wyka’s theoretical considerations allowed to treat them as one generation literary figures. The analysis of writings left by priest Jan Kudera, Konstanty Prus and priest Emil Szramek provided a range of evidence of great versatility and interests of these regional literary activists. Making use of different research tools from different fields of knowledge, but mainly of sociology of literature, it was possible to locate these regional artists along with the results of their work in a given time, the determined political, and social-cultural situation and because of this their works were truly justified. Using criteria typical of domestic literary facts yet with special attention paid to the local, regional conditioning, it was shown that the very beginning of the research on Silesian literature and culture were not just merely worthless attempts, unworthy of mentioning. Although J. Kudera, K. Prus and E. Szramek can be situated along the edge of the main methodological ideas in the general Polish literary scale and thus are not really unique in themselves but in the regional perspective they become of different value - having become of fundamental meaning since they are the basis for research of the next generation scientists among others such as Ludwik Brożek, Zdzisław Hierowski, Witold Nawrocki and Jan Zaremba.