Abstrakt: | The present work is a collection of studies concerning the shaping of literary
consciousness in Polish literature around the year 1956. The author, basing
on rich resources of literary criticism, attempts to describe the tensions that
typified the culture of those times. He makes references how to the world
view of those times and places the modern aesthetic programmes in the context
of the tradition. The author does not regard this book as a monograph,
he prefers instead to treat the analyses collected in it as a point of departure
for further studies and diagnoses.
In the Dialectic of the Breakthrough, the network of the relations of mutual
dependence has been presented between various orders: the ideological
one (Marxism, existentialism, personalism), the diachronic (literary tradition),
and the synchronic one (programmes of modern art). In the author’s
opinion, a comparison of the regular features of those orders is needed to
determine the importance of the discussed breakthrough in Polish culture
and literature in the middle of the 20th c. The study in question, of central
significance for the whole book, makes it possible not only to grasp the ideological
contexts of the breakthrough, but also to comprehend the dichotomy
of ideological attitudes of the artists that flourished in those times.
Having conceded that existentialist tendencies were of foremost importance
in that period, the author, in his analysis called The existentialism of the
October period, discusses the consequences of transplanting that world view
into the Polish soil, and the way those consequences are presented in the critical
writings published so far. The author shows how much the thesis about
the great role of existentialism in that period has been resisted, and how very
politicised the assessment of existentialism in the criticism of 1950s was. The
study Towards a model of modern literature contains a discussion of aesthetic and
ideological contexts of breaking after 1955 with the doctrine of socialist realism
and of turning towards those currents of aesthetic thought that, on the one
hand, referred to the concepts of art that developed after 1918 (such as, inter
alia, futurism, the Cracow Avant‑garde,
the Second Avant‑garde),
and that
constructed a programme for a new art, on the other (the imaginative poetry,
the “black prose”; among other things). Finally, the study From socialist realism
to the thematic literature is devoted to the process of the critics’ defining in a new
way the concept of realism, liberated finally from its ideological dependence. |