Nowocześni i nowoczesne. Konstelacje wyobraźni

Abstract

In the debates on literary modernism, a map of trends and tendencies, crystallized writing projects, established programme positions ultimately influencing ideological and artistic (non)consequences was created. These included, among others, the confrontational fields of avant-garde and clas-sicism, such as the indication and classification of places of expressionism, futurism, dadaism and other literary trends of the 20th century. The author of the book is interested in the state of “insatiability” – in the escape from creative stabilisation, in the imprisonment of the schema, in the desire to be constantly “before”, and never in the annihilating individuality of the row. In the superordinate dimension, this state means searching for aesthetic and ethical solutions in skirmishes with the material world of our contemporary times, marking paths in hidden passages of imagination and creating our own (ready to break) forms of expression. The selected writers wanted to be artists of the new era who take up, of course “on their own ac-count”, eternal and universal problems: they ask about God, existence, the limits of cognition; they create surreal transcodes or generate equivalents, look for epiphany traces, sometimes choose paths of ideological engagement, confront (see concrete poets) with the flicker and uncertainty of the sign presence. They follow their own paths, they often seem to say: “and, by the way, this can be solved differently”; they are sometimes consistent, they get lost in hermetic messages, they are torn between the certainty of elitist indi-vidualism and the idea of democratisation and popularization of art. First of all, Tytus Czyżewski – a painter poet, co-participant in the of-fensive of the Polish avant-garde, author of primitive stylized pastorals – has been referred to with the idea of his “transformational” attempts to go beyond the matter of reality, the reality of experience and the experience of reality. Next, the reading of Tadeusz Peiper’s erotic poems is analysed, which in standard approaches (problems of the “genre variety” and “awareness”) was proposed by Andrzej K. Waśkiewicz – an editor and a valued expert in the interwar avant-garde, interested in literature, programmes, strategies of the Futurists and the poets associated with the “Zwrotnica” magazine. In Peiper’s masterful sphere of influence, one can place Mila Elin, a person out-side the anthological “canon”, a poet who also designs an erotic code.Two more writers of the interwar period will appear: Stanisław Grędziński, the author of Parabola, and Lech Piwowar with the volumes Raj w nudnym zajeździe, Śmierć młodzieńca w śródmieściu, Co wieczór. Poezje. In the sketches devoted to them we return to futuristic poetics, the moment of activating the potential of expressionist lyricism and the so-called engaged poetry, the work of social expression. In Grędziński’s Psalm, as interpreted here, it is ultimately about rebellion in a metaphysically understood dimen-sion, depicting a pre-catastrophic fear. The text draws attention to the sub- jective presence of the rebel, prepared for the judgments of fate, daring to speak out and ready to “talk to God” (we return to such a “communication situation” when reading a poem by Tadeusz Gajcy). While reading Piwowar’s works, questions about the avant-garde imagination annexing the proletar-ian gesture of discord will arise. The poet was associated, among others, with the Krakow Writers’ Club (1929–1930), and with the literary and artistic cir-cles “Litart” (1931–1935) and “VOLTY” (1935–1937), since 1933 he cooper-ated with the “Cricot” Artistic Theatre. Perceived in the Peiper school, he was to be – in Hieronim Michalski’s term – “an ardent pupil”, according to Julian Przyboś – a “faithful and fanatical” pupil. The research has focused on works using – ideologically functionalized – explosive images, the motifs of blood and fire. Between the pre-war and post-war texts (“interepoch”?) there is a poem entitled Schodząc by Tadeusz Gajcy. The diagnostic characteristics drawn up by Stanisław Bereś hits the mark: “Deep subjectivity, intimacy and the internalisation of all deliberations characterise the poet’s entire output. Rep-resenting a sensitivity of the traumatic type, a neurotic and, despite all ap-pearances, lonely personality, he made his poetry a kind of lyrical testament, a constant dialogue with himself and transcendence […]. Gajcy’s poems, in spite of their obsessiveness, are testimony to extremely interesting and spectacular experiments of imagination”. He is the poet we need. True, he declaredly refused to accept the conceit and intellectualism of Peiper’s circle, and the bankruptcy of the poets of the Skamander group was a fact for him. “Catastrophic vision”, his “shades, spots, throws” (these “throws” and “after-images”, seem particularly sense-making) become an inflammatory spark of the writer’s imagination and of whoever tries to break through the swamps and open spaces of vision. The next part is devoted to the work Odwrócone światło by Tymoteusz Karpowicz, talks and correspondence by Jarosław Borowiec with Krystyna Miłobędzka and Andrzej Falkiewicz, Karpowicz with Miłobędzka and Fal- kiewicz, Karpowicz with Heinrich Kunstmann, and concrete poetry classi-fications of Józef Bujnowski. In Dwie rozmowy one can follow the erudite “hours of thought” of the co-participants in the debates, who discuss the ideas and messages of the works, devising forthcoming publications. The subject of the description is an epistolographic composition, a set for arranging parts of “life and work” with difficult instructions of “metaphysics of art”. One of the two sentences preceding the volume was written by Falkiewicz: „…nasze życie i nasze dzieło także filozofują, …filozofują za nas i bez nas…” [“…our life and our work also philosophise, …they philosophise for us and without us…”]. We listen (=read), we do not peek – after all, everything has been put into letters which form an intriguing testimony of intellectual “friendship-differences”. “Everything”, and “letters”, and “put” can be taken in inverted commas, and thus treated as a challenge to contextual considerations, a call for – often laboratory – trials and errors of our ratio. In the book’s closing text, an attempt is made to recall the systematising findings of Józef Buj- nowski, concerning concrete poetry. His research key words are “models” and “structures” – methodologically validated in text analyses of the loca-tions of visual and phonic works, systematisation of groups and subgroups of artistic combinations, juxtaposed factography. The author of Modern writers… is intrigued by “updating the past”, not only in the sense of archival blowing of dust from books. Mieczysław Porębski closed his work entitled Granica współczesności with a sentence: „Nie postąpimy […] kroku dalej, póki z twardej łupiny przekazanego nam mitu nie wyłuskamy do końca ziaren ukrytej tam, a dla nas ciągle istotnej inicjującej informacji”. [“We shall not take […] a step further until we have fully extracted from the hard shell of the myth the grains of the initiating information hidden there, and still important to us”]. The Great Avant-garde - let us cut out the words of Józef Czechowcz from the text and context – ‘has entered the myth’. The book is a story about imagination, about choices, not only the aesthetic ones, about the necessity of calling into existence a poem that draws words into a centrifuge of multiplied meanings and semantic bat-tles, a story presented with conviction about the value of experiment and having the power of deconventionalising text configurations of the “new art”.