Miasto-moloch. Trwałe składowe kreacji przestrzeni Łodzi w literaturze do 1939 roku

Abstract

The article analyzes texts that represent the artistically diverse literary forms which were written in Polish, German, Yiddish, Hebrew and Russian in Łódź before 1939. The author attempts to identify the constitutive elements of the “Łódź text” (based on Toporow’s typography) and seeks similarities in the ways in which space in a modern industrial city is created in the modernist literature. The space of Łódź created before 1939 is discontinuous, transitory, and filled with its anonymous residents, working masses and peddlers. Łódź, like Manchester, London, Chicago and New York, is a modernist colossal urban space of swindle, extortion and degradation that brings chaos and is impenetrable and oppressive. The language of spatial creation in Łódź, the resulting “Łódź text”, reflects its key components – the problems of industrialization and modernity.