Głos z emigracji? : o "Stopie Ikara" Andrzeja Brychta - ścieżkami literatury popularnej

Abstract

Andrzej Brycht’s literary output, as in a lens, focuses on many problems of the postwar culture, and, hence, still seems interesting for the historians of literature. His works reflect not only the spiritual condition of people living in the Polish People’s Republic and literature entanglements at that time, but also constitute an interesting piece of evidence of following readers’ tastes, and searching methods of gaining wide circles of receivers. Also in Stopa Ikara (1975, published in Polish in 1990), the writer refers to the conventions of the popular literature, and plays brave literary games typical of this type of writing. The aim of the article is to show how Brycht realizes well-known formulas of the popular prose in the text in question, and an attempt to interpret selected motives included in the book (the role of mythological, criminal, and pornographic motives). An interesting aspect of the book is the creation of a character-emigrant having a lot in common with author’s biography. That is why what becomes important is examining the phenomenon of a type of an autobiographic attitude. However, at the same time, all the text components such as the poetics of the prose, playing clearly with tastes of an average reader or operating on the edge of a good taste or kitsch reveal the status of its virtual addressee. Stopa Ikara (a text referring in its title to a famous picture by Bruegel) filled with literary cliches, constitutes in fact an unusual case of a popular prose as on the one hand, it is conventional and consciously-written to meet the public expectations, and, on the other, the very work is related to the writer’s self-creative strategy. Thus, Brycht’s book can be read as a piece of evidence of the evolution of a controversial writer’s writing (well-known and promoted in the Polish People’s Republic) that tried to return to the literary market after the years of the break and in a different political situation.