Grzebanie grzebania : archeolog i grabarz w twórczości Jerzego Ficowskiego

Abstract

The study is an endeavour to present the phenomenon of Jerzy Ficowski’s language and poetic imagination. It focuses on questions concering the specific literary-epistemological project that emerges from various types of texts the writer had created. In the present study, the writer’s entire output – literary and cultural – as well as the voluminous archive collected by the author of A Reading of Ashes [Odczytanie popiołów] are given much reflection. The archive (repeatedly used as the main theme in his prose and poetry) as a manifestation of predilection for “retaining” and “collecting”, simultaneously becomes the most significant context of interpretation of his works. The title archeologist and gravedigger are not only the main characters of the writer’s many poems and short stories but, in Ficowski’s works, the gravedigging and archeological motifs function as complex metaphor of recollection and cognition, linguistic processes and processes of comprehension, setting hermeneutic desire in opposition to anti-hermeneutic necessity. Most often, however, they are used as metaphors of being, which relate to the philosophy of creating and being in the world.