Ironia modernistów. Studia

Abstract

The present book initiates a new scholarly series The Young Poland Movement: Revisions and Interpretations. The first volume of the series is dedicated to modernist irony, and we hope that it will start a new critical reflection on this category. The articles explore different aspects of the problem, examine different faces of irony, and consider different texts to identify possible types of irony (and also of sarcasm) both as an aesthetic stance and a worldview. Gabriela Matuszek, Hanna Ratuszna, Dorota Wojda, Paweł Wojciechowski focus on the writings of Maria Komornicka, Jan Lemański, Bolesław Leśmian, and Karol Irzykowski, exposing the possibility of irony hidden in the fabric of the texts, the mechanisms by means of which irony operates in them, ways of generating ironic modes, and ways of interpreting irony in poetic and critical discourse. By listing possible characteristics of modernist irony, Wiesław Rzońca manages to reach back to its beginnings. Wojciech Hamerski traces back its romantic provenances. Anna Janicka demonstrates how irony harmonizes with naturalism in Gabriela Zapolska’s writings. Two articles (by Marek Kurkiewicz and Anna Wydrycka) center on ways of exposing and analyzing irony in Antoni Lange’s writings. Urszula M. Pilch’s text shows how the lyrics of the Young Poland Movement exemplify the ironic stance towards the world understood as absence. Marek Grajek takes into critical consideration Stanisław Przybyszewski’s Topiel. Weronika Szulik and Kamil Krzysztof Pilichiewicz look into the oeuvre of Roman Jaworski with the critical assistance of Karol Irzykowski and Michał Głowiński. Tomáš Horváth and Iryna Shevchenko assume a comparative perspective to see Polish and foreign modernist literature on the same critical plane. While the former analyzes narrative irony in Ján Hrušovski’s novel and Stefan Grabiński’s novellas, the latter compares the poetry of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer with the poetry of Ivan Franko. Aleksandra Kołodziejczyk considers Russian literature, focusing on Alexander Blok’s poetry. In her article, Jolanta Dragańska points to the historiosophical variant of irony in Amelia Hertzówna’s works. Marcin Bajko draws our attention to Stanisław Ludwik Liciński’s proclivity to irony. The irony of Wacław Berent’s prose comes under scrutiny in the article by Wojciech Gruchała, who critically re-interprets Ozimina. Jarosław Ławski discovers a modality of irony in the workings of Tadeusz Miciński. The articles gathered in the present volume demonstrate the historical, European and Polish contexts and provenances of modernist irony. They discuss the presence of self-irony in the works analyzed, as well as the links between irony and grotesque and tragedy. As a result, modernist irony comes to be perceived both in its significance and uniqueness. Irony of Modernists is the fruit of the First Conference “The Young Poland Movement: Revisions and Re-Interpretations,” which took place on 12 and 13 May 2017 in Białystok, and which was organized by the Chair in Philological Studies ‘East-West,’ the University of Białystok; the Chair in the History of the Literature of Polish Positivism and the Young Poland Movement, the Jagiellonian University; and the Scholarly Section of the Łukasz Górnicki Library in Białystok. The Conference proceedings were coordinated by Urszula M. Pilch, PhD (the Jagiellonian University), Marcin Bajko, PhD (the University of Białystok), and Professor Jarosław Ławski (the University of Białystok). The Conference venue was the Łukasz Górnicki Library in Białystok. The next conference in the same series will take place in Ocober 2018 and will be occasioned by the centenary of the death of Tadeusz Miciński (1876–1918), a notable Polish modernist writer.