This article addresses the issue of the interpretation of proper names in poetry. The state of research on the functions of proper names in literature is well described, but it is possible to note the lack of a fixed interpretation strategy in poetry which means that, despite little interest in poetry, its researchers often try to propose their own methods of analysis. The authors of the article, who tackle onyms in the poetry of Bruno Jasieński, present their own methodological approach to the matter, based on B. Waldenfels’ concept of the “phenomenology of the alien”.

Regarded primarily as a scandalist, Bruno Jasieński is also an innovator and ‘theoretician’ of the avant-garde. Then, so the argument, he converted to Communism and put his pen in the service of that ideology. He paid for it with the price of debasing his talent to the level of a socialist realist hack and, eventually, the price of his life when the regime he so avidly supported turned on him in the great purges of 1937–38. This article takes issue with the claim – which is part of the generally accepted narrative – that Jasieński ‘swerved gently to the left’ in 1923–1925. This article analyses the politics of young Bruno Jasieński's verse, i.e. the texts produced before 1921, the year of the publication of the first collection of his poems. In so far as his early poetic work contains nothing but praise of the Russian revolution and its ethos, his ideological evolution in the nineteen twenties should termed radicalization rather than a shift to the left.

This article considers the role of the sister figure in Bruno Jasieński's early verse. His poems as well as various facts from his biography leave little doubt that this highly significant role was filled by Irena Zysman, his sister. The key to the dialectic of her presence/absence in the poet's life and work is to be found in the concept of melancholy. Although Jasieński would hardly be credited with that kind of sensibility, the relationship with his sister does show that melancholy was part of his psychological makeup. Moreover, by bringing in psychoanalytical analysis, the article shows how his melancholy morphed into mania, a transformation which in a way fuelled his political engagement.

This article looks at Brunon Jasieński's revolutionary novel I burn Paris ( Je brûle Paris) in the context of the key ideas of Marxist philosophy and that strand of its contemporary reception which saw in it a blend of agitprop and apocalyptic fiction. A close reading of I burn Paris reveals that its author is anything but an orthodox Marxist and his Marxism is open to all kinds of alterations and ideological variants. The article, inspired by Peter Sloterdijk's discussion of ressentiment, argues that the best way to make sense of those disparities is to treat them not as deviations but as an attempt to converge the ideological vision and the thymos (in the sense given to it by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man); or, in other words, an attempt at tapping and channeling the accumulated rage of the masses to energize the Communist project.