Konteksty

Anthropology of Poems

Paweł Próchniak — 2025-12-17

An introduction to the problem of anthropological reflection dealing with poetry. The authors postulate the inclusion of poetry into the domain of anthropological reflection, arguing that poetry is not solely an object from aesthetic space but also belongs to an area of cognition and provides insight into areas of reality that are hard to reach or inaccessible; this is the reason why large scale anthropological discoveries can take place, and do so, also in poetry.

Che cos’è la poesia?

Dariusz Czaja — 2025-12-17

An attempt at a philosophical and anthropological reflection on the essence of the poetic word. The author consciously situates his arguments beyond recognitions on the subject of poetry, to be found in routine philological and literary studies reflection. By referring to the philosophy of Karl Jaspers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Owen Barfield he indicates predominantly the cognitive and existential dimension of the poetic word. In doing so Dariusz Czaja demonstrates that contrary to colloquial notions poetry is not “dark speech”, a refined ornament of language, but a fully-fledged form of cognition. Moreover, the poetic word – sole, idiomatic, and irreplaceable – is exceptional. Extraordinarily, by indicating reality beyond itself (by aiming at the non-verbal world) it does not lose its substantial capacity and indicates itself. In other words: after fulfilling its referential function the poetic world does not vanish.

Voices from the Void

Dariusz Czaja — 2025-12-17

An attempt at an anthropological commentary on an exceptional volume of poems: The Voices of Babyn Yar (2017) by the Ukrainian poet Marianna Kiyanovska, recipient of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize for outstanding literary accomplishments. Babyn Yar is actually a single poem composed of numerous parts and constitutes a specific (poetic) mirror whose shattered fragments attempt to restore memory about the slaughter of ca. 34 000 Jews of Kiev, committed in 1941 in Babyn Yar near Kiev. The poems – hallucinatory, trance-like, and with an intentionally broken syntax – are an attempt at recalling and preserving individual, prematurely extinguished lives. This exceptionally emotional poetry also possesses great cognitive power. The author enters terrains preserved for the historian not in order to compete. Hers are different registers of the past and she attempts to apply imagination so as to fill spaces that have not been confirmed in available material. By doing so, Kiyanovska interposes herself between established facts and events reconstructed by researchers in an attempt to recreate that which had not been recorded. She deals not with that which took place, but with that which could have occurred.

Place of Hope

Wiera Meniok — 2025-12-17

The author considers the poetry of Serhiy Zhadan written after the unleashing of Russian aggression in Ukraine. The warp of the essay consists of poems originating from Zhadan’s first “wartime” volume – The Life of Mary (2015), and from the most recent volume: Skrypnykówka (2023; Polish edition 2025). The title relates to the first Ukrainian spelling, introduced in 1928 in Kharkiv, by Mykola Skrypnyk. His surname gave rise to the term “skrypnykovka” (or Kharkiv spelling), which symbolically returns in Zhadan’s poems and his most recent prose – Arabesque (2024), intentionally echoing the title of a story by Khvylovy: written a hundred years ago it gave rise to an urban text from Ukrainian Kharkiv, which now, despite the war, is continued by Zhadan. The axis of the conceptual-interpretation essay is composed of the affinityof Zhadan’s poems with the language of poetry by Rilke, Celan, Milosz, and Ficowski and Schulz. Zhadan’s poetry, written in the course of a war, is interpreted as an anthropological and metaphorical personification of catastrophe and, above all, as a place of hope.

Return of the Void

Ostap Sływynski — 2025-12-17

Set Change, a poem by the Ukrainian poet Yurii Andrukhovych, first published in the volume Exotic Birds and Plants (1991) and translated into Polish by Jacek Podsiadło, appears to be particularly relevant today, during the Russian-Ukrainian war and the erasure of traces of Ukrainian culture and identity in territories occupied by Russia. The metaphor in the poem’s title is, however, ironic and misleading: the poem is not about a superficial change of cultural symbols and patterns, but about replacing culture, values, and meanings with nothingness and emptiness. The clear anti-colonial and anti-nihilistic message of Andrukhovych’s poem renders it a text addressing the sensitivity of not only Ukrainians today, but all nations threatened by authoritarianism and aggressive expansionism.

Wierzbicki: Pine Cone – Allusions and Symbols

Eugeniusz Nachlik — 2025-12-17

An explanation of mythological and Christian as well as historical and cultural allusions and symbols in Szyszka pinii (Pine Cone), a poem by Father Alfred Marek Wierzbicki, a contemporary Polish poet, theologian, ethician, and professor, written in Palermo and Lublin on 12–17 February 2023. The author’s reflection in this religious-philosophical poem follows the evolution of mankind from the sensual-fascinating Dionysian stand to the artistic Apollonian stance, emerging against a sensual-fascinating background, and then to the Platonic spiritual stance. And further – from Christian beginnings perceived as the light of comfort in suffering to that which is divine and human, humanitarian and full of an awareness of own value, but also humble and redemptive.

Irwaneć: Frivolous Tone and Black Humour

Eugeniusz Nachlik — 2025-12-17

The article discusses Family name, a poem by Oleksandr Irwaneć, a contemporary Ukrainian author and former member of the Bu-Ba-Bu literary group. This particular work discloses recognizable traits of the author’s poetry: frivolity, naturalism, the grotesque, irony, and black humour. In the first part of the poem the author plays games with his surname – the same as that of a river in the former principality of Chernigov. In the second part he mocks tempting but deceitful mails about supposedly unexpected inheritances and boasts of his resistance although his irony remains bitter: actually, he would like to receive the offered millions.

I Bet You Wish You Were Here / Golden Ratio = Ukraine

Danylo Ilnytskyi — 2025-12-17

The text was written upon the basis of the author’s two statements-commentaries made during the XI International Bruno Schulz Festival in Drohobych as part of the “poems in air raid shelters” cycle held on 9 July 2024. The author of this essay interprets the poem by Oleksandr Irwaneć, referring to the works of the Ukrainian poet and performer Nazar Hončar and to an amusing adventure experienced by the British actor Rowan Atkinson. The game played with one’s surname and ironic self-observation possess not only a humorous-experimental nature but also, in a way, an ontological-dramatic one. “Each joke contains a seed of truth” and clowning changes into a serious self-dialogue. The funny story connected with his own surname inspires the author to cross the boundaries of that game for at least a brief moment. While adhering to a classical correlation between Dionysian and Apollonian elements, the author noticed in the poem by Alfred Wierzbicki a juxtaposition between Russian and Ukrainian culture; more, between mental-spiritual images of the world.

Paper and Memory

Maciej Tramer — 2025-12-17

The article explores the impact that the circumstances surrounding a text can have on the manner in which it later enters the consciousness of its readers. The poem subjected to particular attention is the well-known Elegia [o chłopcu polskim] (Elegy [for a Polish Boy]) by Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, along with the significant change to its title made by the poet’s mother. As a result of this alteration, the text underwent a sui generis Polonization, and the allusion to Heinrich Heine’s poem Enfant perdu was effectively obscured. The article raises questions about the extent to which the poet’s tragic fate may have influenced both Stefania Baczyńska and Kazimierz Wyka, who prepared the first non-underground selection of the young poet’s work – a volume in which Elegy… was first published. Clues for these considerations are found in the previously unknown correspondence between Baczyński’s mother and Jerzy Andrzejewski, as well as in Wyka’s recollections from his first post-war visits to the totally destroyed city of Warsaw. The article was written and presented in Drohobych, Ukraine, on November 19, 2023.

In the Words of Pain

Helena Hejman — 2025-12-17

Aleksander Wat was one of those “great ill men of literature” who, dissatisfied with the indifferent language of medicine, stressed in their experience of an illness a human, own perspective. Testimonies of Wat’s painful malady – scattered in diaries, correspondence, and the book Mój wiek, and markedly present in his prose and poetry – never resemble observations of indices from a patient’s chart/diary and are always already interpretations and carriers of anthropological meanings. This sketch starts with the story Śmierć w szpitalu (Death in Hospital) in which the poetry of pain appears intra-typographically so as to once again read the poem with the W czterech ścianach… (Within Four Walls…) incipit as an explanation and transmutation of the poem about pain into a written down poem. This brief and frequently commented work constituting a hopeless centre of “the regions of suffering”, provides insight into the personality of the patient divided by an inner wall of pain, and explains this experience to citizens of the “world of the healthy” unfamiliar with it.

"Mr. Cogito’s Reflections on Redemption"

Andrzej Tyszczyk — 2025-12-17

A presentation of an anthropologically oriented interpretation of Rozmyślania Pana Cogito o odkupieniu (Mr. Cogito’s Reflections on Redemption), the well-known poem by Zbigniew Herbert. The author of the article stresses the poem’s semantic ambivalence, which could become a foundation for divergent interpretations. Moreover, he proposes a lesson in which divergent deciphering becomes integrated as the components of a single semantic figure (without losing their opposition) described by the author as the figure of transcendental tragedy.

From Experiencing Reality to Experiencing a Spectacle

Piotr Śliwiński — 2025-12-17

The involvement of contemporary poetry suggests a question about its links with traditions of politically active poetry, predominantly the undertakings of the 1968 generation. What links both formations and what fundamentally separates them? The status of reality turns out to be completely different. In the 1970s reality had an overwhelming character, remained arduous and severe. Today reality undulates, changes, and possesses the structures of pretence, but utopias and ideologies appear to be once again attractive.

Scintillation

Paweł Próchniak — 2025-12-17

An interpretation insight into the main plot of the essay Mityzacja rzeczywistości (The Mythologization of Reality), in which Bruno Schulz indicates, with his characteristic insight, those features of poetry as an art of the word that render it a form and a tool of cognition oriented metaphysically and, at the same time, anthropologically. The definition of poetry formulated by Schulz is developed by the author of this sketch (based on the principle of an arcade of analogues) and placed within the context of recognitions pertaining to the cognitive power of the metaphor formulated by writers and thinkers belonging to the same cultural formation, including the author of Sklepy cynamonowe (The Cinnamon Shops / The Street of Crocodiles) (Lucian Blaga, José Ortega y Gasset, Wallace Stevens).

“This is what I remember” – continuations in the poetry of Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller from Laguna Pueblo

Ewa Dżurak — 2025-12-17

Leslie Marmon Silko published Storyteller in 1981 (second edition 2012). This is her first work translated into Polish as Opowiadaczka z Puebla Laguna (2024). The format of the exceptional publication escapes genre classification and contains 8 short stories, over 20 poems, more than 20 short prose texts, and 26 black and white photos. The structure of the volume resembles a spider’s web, with radials of themes emerging from the centre and connecting concentric spiral threads of motifs. The book is, first and foremost, homage to the storytelling tradition of Laguna Pueblo and its culture. The presented article intends to familiarize readers with Leslie Marmon Silko and, in particular, to stress poetry strongly rooted in Laguna Pueblo culture.

Images That Heal

Andrzej Rozwadowski — 2025-12-17

Photographic collections depicting North American Indians from the turn of the 20th century are an atlas of sorts intended to document a “vanishing race”. Today, this atlas is subject to critical evaluation with one of the forms of its contestation being contemporary First Nations’ art. The article shows a specific aspect of such art, in which the “photographic atlas” is decolonised by symbols belonging to the “indigenous atlas” of the First Nations. Important symbols of this “indigenous and first atlas” are rock paintings, a confirmation of the First Nations’ rights to the lands they inhabit since time immemorial. The article explores how motifs of this “first art” are inscribed into the contemporary artistic projects of the First Nations, particularly those in which these two atlases are confronted, and rock paintings act as a medium of transfer to the world of ancestors and the core of indigenous spirituality.

Blinks of an Eye and Snapshots

Magdalena Barbaruk — 2025-12-17

The point of departure of Magdalena Barbaruk’s reflections consists of experiencing weariness accompanying her while reading stories from Latin America. She proposes a hypothesis that the responsibility lay in their monumental and snapshot form. Additionally, Barbaruk declared that even extensive and appreciated stories confirm the thesis about the crisis of narration and, according to Byung-Chul Han, more extensively of contemporary culture. The author’s reflection revolves around questions whether Latin America is a blink of an eye land, what does this mean, and what sort of an impact this has on stories dedicated to Latin America. Barbaruk asks whether the syncretic, Tik-Tok material reality of globalised America deprived of an aura offers an opportunity for an epiphany of being. While seeking possibilities for a story envisaged as a tale about the present she seeks inspiration, i.a. from Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin (Denkbilder) or Olga Tokarczuk (“the tender narrator”). Doing so Barbaruk declares that the blink of an eye concept can be linked with memory and experiencing the past (not contrary to Heidegger’s conception focused on the “ecstasy” of contemporaneity). Barbaruk does not regard reportage as information about the unknown but as an epiphany-like (shaman) art of spinning a story, i.e. she links the “present” with a certain type of congestion of the sense offered by poetry or a ritual. Inspired by Pasażerowie. Ayahuasca i duchy Amazonii by Mateusz Marczewski, she declares that a reportage can be tactile, healing, and offering insight into reality, but also into one’s own situation.

The Century of Memories

Jurko Prochasko — 2025-12-17

The essay presents a cross-section of most important accomplishments within the range of assorted science disciplines, traditions, and paradigms as well as several literary events that impacted the moulding of the present-day comprehension of memory. The chosen period is the “long twentieth century”, associated with a question asking why extremely different theories of memory occupied such a significant rank during this particular historical time, and why did it become the “century of memory?”. Within the wide contexts of theories of modernity, modernization, secularisation, and the disintegration of traditional worlds, attention was paid to several basic intuitions, theories, and conceptualisations derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Bergsonism, assorted currents of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the aesthetics of reception, poststructuralism, contemporary historical and humanities studies, as well as the theory of collective, mass, and cultural memory. Particular attention was paid to ways of treating poetics devoted to Bruno Schulz. Memory constellations and challenges associated with the present-day war in Ukraine were noticed. An attempt was made to define the most significant memory motifs in contemporary times, including dialectics between fear of forgetting, comprehended as fear of loss, and fear of an un-wanted return (repetition) of the ousted and the forgotten.

Why Does Bruno Schulz Always Return?

Myroslav Marynovych — 2025-12-17

The author of this essay considers the meanings of the works, life, and murder of Bruno Schulz within the space of particular acoustic qualities and exegetic significance of his constant presence in his hometown as well as the dramatic causes of his irrevocable re-appearances in memory and post-memory at the time of the war waged in Ukraine. Bridges between the fulfilled catastrophe and the catastrophe taking place today have been erected upon the basis of allusions taken from Schulz’s stories, i.a. Treatise on Mannequins, Letters and Drawings, Dead Season, August, and The Night of the Great Season. The author’s reflection links theosophical and anthropological paths and welds the bases of the past and the present, while the figure explaining those links and echoes continues to be Schulz himself, absorbed by means of the eternal antagonisms of the essential and the tawdry, the sacral and the profane, the victim and the murderer. The presented essay brings to mind both paradoxical and irreversible returns of the consequences of the unleashed macabre: shots aimed at the back of Schulz’s head and that of the Ukrainian poet Vakulenko. The drama of the bestial war in Ukraine has been depicted in Biblical and historical contexts as a paroxysm of the fury of evil which, despite all, will be incapable of reversing the will of providence.

Memory: Inclusion, Disenfranchisement

Danylo Ilnytskyi — 2025-12-17

The text was written upon the basis of the author’s appearance during the XI International Bruno Schulz Festival in Drohobycz as part of a “memory, presence, returns” discussion panel, which took place on 8 July 2024. By basing himself on the theme of the discussion the author proposes to expand the categories of “presence” and “returns” into two other conceptions: “inclusion” and “disenfranchisement”. This reflection was created against the background of defying (or rather the antinomy of) responsible memory, a memory of constant inclusion which can change into construction, ideological conditioning, and even conjuncture – as well as involuntary memory: the sort that creates itself and which at times is wild and rampant, but invariably monolithic in its veracity and free nature.

Experiencing the SchulzFest Community as a Bridge between the Past and the Future

Dariusz Wojakowski — 2025-12-17

The intention of this article is to demonstrate the role played by the SchulzFest artistic community in Drohobycz in conditions of a social crisis connected with the outbreak of a full-scale war in Ukraine. The role in question is described both within the context of practices reinterpreting the past evoked by the works and life of Bruno Schulz, as well as the biographical and institutional significance of “the second past” – events and actors associated with undertakings pursued for the sake of remembering Schulz in the course of the past twenty years. This “second past” created a specific network of social links that in wartime conditions emerged as a special community described as “the Republic of Dreams”. The latter’s features include capability of transforming activities, targets, and structures while remaining resilient and constituting a communitas of helpers supporting others and itself.

The Bruno Schulz golus Image-puzzle

Karen Underhill — 2025-12-17

In this essay, written in honor of the late Prof. Jerzy Jarzębski, a discussion of the Yiddish term “golus” – a bivalent word meaning both “exile” and “diaspora” – becomes an opportunity to reflect on several themes that define and link the work of Bruno Schulz, the life and scholarship of Jerzy Jarzębski, and also the context of shelter and solidarity created at the 2024 SchulzFest in Drohobycz. In his 1937 essay on the artist E.M. Lilien, Schulz described Lilien’s work as a “creation born of the longing of golus”. This article proposes that in his diasporic modernist poetics, Bruno Schulz succeeded in actively harnessing the “obraz-zagadka” of golus to create a literature that could encapsulate the unresolvable tension of life as a Jewish writer in the post-WWI Europe of nation states; and, that the author’s lasting gesture was to open this specific Jewish experience to the stranger, and to the other.

Bruno Schulz Says Who He Is

Stanisław Rosiek — 2025-12-17

The author reconstructs the circumstances of the “coming out” of Bruno Schulz-the painter, i.e. a presentation of his visual works at an exhibition held in Borysław in 1921. By focusing on the perception of those works he discloses the stake of disclosure whose gesture not only described the “tragic ethos”, fascinations, and fears of the author, but also in a provocative manner violates the local, Drohobycz status quo. The text also displays the process of the formation of Schulz’ visual style against the backdrop of the visual culture of the epoch: in this manner it shows the way in which Schulz transcends it and what “courage of disclosure” means in this particular case.

Surreal Aspects of Andrzej Pawłowski’s Art in the Optics of Short Stories by Bruno Schulz

Kinga Burek-Domżalska — 2025-12-17

Andrzej Pawłowski’s works are not an interpretation of Schulz’s prose. The author of the article used the writer’s texts as a research tool and was encouraged to do so by a new fact concerning Pawłowski’s literary interests. In her research she treats the concept of surrealism more broadly than merely limiting it to a concrete trend in art, but as a specific creative attitude that manifests itself in different periods in the history of art. In doing so she analyses Pawłowski’s art within the range of various media: from experimental film and photography to sculpture. Selected writings and theoretical concepts possessing an inseparable connection with Pawłowski’s work have been taken into consideration. The author’s attempt to use literary research for the purpose of studying visual art enabled her to better demonstrate the previously unnoticed surrealist aspects of his art.

At the Home of Bruno Schulz

Monika Sznajderman — 2025-12-17

For the author of this article the home of Bruno Schulz in Drohobycz, preserving invisible traces of the artist’s life, becomes a point of departure or rather an excursion involving other “ghostly” spaces according to a description by Katarzyna Kończal, who refers them to the works of W.G. Sebald, spaces in which the living dwell next to the dead and time becomes suspended. Forays along literary trails in search for traces of those slain in the Holocaust.

Archaic Origins of the Phenomenon of “Place”

Michał Klinger — 2025-12-17

The archaic Scripture contains the message of primordial “places” that become “events”, sometimes extremely mysterious ones (Moriah, Golgotha). A via negativa of sorts marks the myth of Paradise: the creative act fills “lack” in the still empty place. This “change” creates a “site of a diabolical drama” of fall and salvation. The author postulates creating the foundations of the “place-event” phenomenon.

Gesamtkunstwerk Augenblick

Paweł Drabarczyk vel Grabarczyk — 2025-12-17

In 2014 Gerhard Richter produced paintings-enlarged versions of four photographs taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 and regarded as the sole preserved photographs documenting mass-scale slaughter in Nazi death factories. In a successive stage he painted over the four frames by means of abstract forms. On 9 February 2024 an edition of those paintings was shown in Oświęcim in a specially designed pavilion described as a total work of art composed of reproductions of four photographs “torn out of Hell”, an edition of four Richter canvases, a 8-meter large mirror, and an architectural setting. All incline towards reflection whether the Oświęcim project remains consistent with comments expressed by Georges Didi-Huberman, and to what degree does it betray the message of Images in Spite of All and Bark. Can the question posed by Didi-Huberman – asking whether it is necessary to embellish in order to teach – be applied in the case of a minimalistic pavilion granted rather church-chapel and, at the same time, somewhat “loft” aesthetics? Was Didi-Huberman, while adding the four photographs to his “Gesamtkunstwerk” – in the manner of builders of old erecting churches on sites intended for storing relics or for the sake of honouring them – able not to conceal those “tatters” of fundamental significance?

The Case of Moshe Oved

Agata Lipczik — 2025-12-17

An attempt to characterise the artistic output of Moshe Oved (1885–1958). Born in the then Płock Governorate, this renowned antiquarian was one of the key figures within the artistic community of the Jewish population in London during the first half of the 20th century. Known primarily as a specialist in antique jewellery, he actively participated throughout most of his life in initiatives promoting the work of Jewish artists and was one of the co-founders and later the most active members of the Ben Uri society. In addition to intensive efforts to develop Yiddish culture, Moshe Oved first gained recognition as a poet and subsequently as an artist. His earliest works were jewellery pieces: stylised rings in zoomorphic forms, often adorned with engraved inscriptions of a poetic nature. After the war, Oved also created distinctive sculptures that clearly referred to Jewish mysticism and sometimes, as in the case of a series of six-branched candelabra, served to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. The article highlights the parallel nature of Oved’s sculptural and literary work, whose common denominator was his deep, internal spiritual experience.

The Master and the Museum. The Misadventures of the Bulgakov Museum in Contemporary Kyiv

Weronika Grzesiak — 2025-12-17

Located in the very center of the Ukrainian capital, the Bulgakov Museum has been operating since 1991, commemorating the life and work of the Russian writer and playwright. Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kyiv, lived there for the first half of his life, and dedicated some of his works to the city. In certain pieces – particularly those depicting the battles for the city in 1918 and 1919, which he witnessed – anti-Ukrainian sentiments can be found. Because of this, the legitimacy of founding and maintaining the museum has been questioned from the very beginning of the institution's existence. Since Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014, and especially after the outbreak of full-scale war in February 2022, the Bulgakov Museum has come under intensified criticism from various groups. The contemporary history of the museum, the transformations – both implemented and planned – of its exhibition and the evolving narrative presented within its space, the institution’s new missions, and the ways it grapples with the difficult legacy of colonialism are the subjects of this article.

Topos: Train Station

Agnieszka Bednarek-Bohdziewicz — 2025-12-17

The author analyses the socio-cultural role played by small Kashubian train stations which fulfilled the function not merely of a transport infrastructure but also a place of residence of the employees. The analysis is based on an ethnographic study of train station spaces envisaged as “taskscape” – a dynamic landscape of activities and social relations inspired by Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological conception of dwelling and the anthropological theory proposed by Tim Ingold. Despite the suspension of the train line in 2000, the train stations preserve their symbolic and emotional value by remaining a place of reminiscences and social practices. This space linked the private and public sphere by creating a specific community in which daily activity, scents and sounds merge professional and domestic life. Contemporary attempts at a revitalisation of train stations and their adaptation to the needs of the local community confirm their lasting significance as cultural heritage and space for social meetings. The author stresses that a train station is not merely an architectural object belonging to the transport infrastructure but a living multi-dimensional social and symbolic space of importance for the identity of the local community.