Zmiana : z problemów świadomości literackiej przełomu 1955-1959 w Polsce

Abstract

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.