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 explores various text coding strategies in the work of Polish Futurists. Drawing on the concept of Jerome J. McGann’s bibliographic code, this analysis of the fonts, layout and typographic devices used in their texts reveals a development culminating in literary breakthrough at the beginning of the interwar period. It shows, moreover, that the Futurist revolutionists depended heavily on the material and manufacturing base which they wanted to overthrow and replace. That dependence manifests itself in the incongruous adoption of various traditional fonts, typographic and graphic designs, which remains the most striking characteristic of a Futuristic text.

The article presents a previously unknown poem by Jalu Kurek, found in the Józef Czechowicz Museum of Literature in Lublin. The youthful poem titled Nostalgia shows Kurek’s breaking away from the spell of futurism and edging towards an avant-garde poetics with a great deal of juxtaposition.

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”.

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.

This article is an attempt at interpreting the experimental verse of two Warsaw Futurists, Aleksander Wat's namopaniki and Anatol Stern's romans Peru [ A romance of Peru]. A series of analyses, conducted from the perspective of the materiality of language, indicates that the key to the generic status of Wat's verse is to be sought in the concept of metamorphism. Indeed, his namopaniki are best described as metamorphic poems in which the dynamic of transformation gets the better of both their linguistic material and their presumptive subjects. By associating the linguistic experiments of the two Warsaw Futurists, who came from Jewish families, with the situation of ‘being a stranger to one's language’ (Deleuze and Guattari) and Jacques Derrida's chafing at monolingualism, the article argues that Wat's and Stern's early poetic practice represents a turn to ‘minority art’, i.e. a form of discourse subversive of the dominant hierarchies of the ‘majority’ language and literature. Furthermore, the Deleuzian concept of minor literature ( littérature mineure) may be used to seek a finer differentiation between the Warsaw Futurist avant-garde and the East or West European models of Futurism and Dadaism.

This article deals with the first phase of Jerzy Jankowski’s severing ties with the Young Poland movement and his access to the futurist avant-garde. His conversion to the new poetic worldview, which he pioneered in Poland, was reflected in his articles and poems published in Widnokrąg [Horizon], a magazine he founded in 1913 to replace Tydzień [The Week], of which he was the main publisher. The rebranding came on top of disagreements between the magazine’s contributors. The divergent views focused on the assessment of Tadeusz Miciński’s novel Xiądz Faust. In May 1913, in his former magazine, Jankowski heaped praises on it. However, the following year, when it came up for debate in the Widnokrąg between Miciński’s aficionado Zygmunt Kisielewski and the skeptically-minded Leon Choromański, Jankowski sought to distance himself from both the emotionalism and the intellectualism of his colleagues. By that time he was absolutely adamant that the antinomies of Young Poland’s high art were a trap. Now that the worship of art striving for timeless perfection would have to give way to an unpretentious concern for ‘fugitive art’, the time was ripe for working out a new aesthetic, centered on the thrilling ‘beauty of big cities’, cabaret, cinema, and modern machines. Jankowski broke with his erstwhile mentor Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Zenon Przesmycki-Miriam, to follow the incomparably more exciting Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Meanwhile, Choromański made one last attempt to bring the young man back on track by writing an article, in which he argued that Futurism was crude, and shallow, a throwback rather than a modern breakthrough. However, his warnings made no dint in Jankowski’s faith in futurism. For him its triumph was a matter of historical necessity. And, he had already thrown in his lot with the new movement by publishing his first futurist poems, ‘Spłon lotnika’ [‘Pilot in flames’] and ‘Maggi’.