Trofea wyobraźni : o prozie Leo Lipskiego

Abstract

Triumphs of imagination. On poetry by Leo Lipski is a monograph totally devoted to the literary output of one of the most outstanding 20th century Polish writers. The author includes here the elements of his biography too, basically, though, she emphasizes the interpretative layer of the work. The book analyses Lipski’s juvenilia (chapters: Strefa ciągłości i zerwania… and Sprawy splątane i zamienne), his first post-war novel Niespokojni (chapter “Coś” marzenia…) a labour-camp triptych Dzień i noc (chapters: Szklana kula…, Muchy…, Wesz…), a mini-novel Piotruś (chapter “Nic” rzeczywistości) and two small-scale narrations: Paryż ze złota and a story Sarni braciszek. Triumphs of imagination… were ordered chronologically and thematically at the same time. The first part concerns avant-garde motives in Lipski’s juvenilia: the language of cubism, surrealism and expressionism, as well as older discourses and more deeply rooted in a tradition of Romanticism and Modernism. The subsequent part, that is the analysis of Niespokojni, reveals obtrusive images and compulsive threads in a work of a Polish-Jewish author: the magic of excrement, madness of imagination, the habit of reading and an ordeal of writing. Thanks to a comparative reading and contrasting Lipski with such writers as e.g. Tomasz Mann, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Franz Kafka, Michael Leiris, Georges Bataille, Marcel Proust, his writings ceased to be parochial, local and polycentric, regained a proper place, becoming a part of the West-European literary heritage. Further on, looking at three camp stories highly evaluated by “Kultura” (rewarded by “Kultura” for 1955) the author reconstructs their anthropology, shows the subject being lost in a language, analyses language musicality and relations with a Romantic musical literature, as well as mechanisms and rhetorical techniques used by Lipski. Owing to that, the book on the prose imagination answers the question on how and what it was formed of that it works so efficiently, and why imagination became for Lipski first of all a mythographic-linguistic phenomenon. In Piotruś the tools of psychoanalysis were used one more time, thanks to which it was possible to present this novel as a continuum of Niespokojni and capture the fallibility of memory and fraud of imagination which displayed the remembered images in a changed and destroyed fashion. In Lipski’s late narration the author finds the greatest amount of humanism: pricks of conscience of a child rescued from the Holocaust, memories from the pre-war period, but also a surprising language nakedness and overpresence of parabasis. Imagination is a linguistic space and language is a part of imagination. The book in question has remained most faithful to the very two assumptions.