In 2015, the academic journal Annales published a special volume dedicated to the acclaimed History Manifesto written by Jo Guldi and David Armitage one year earlier. In my article I analyse the background and content of the volume which can be viewed as a French reception of the manifesto

The paper discusses the English language reception of Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s The History Manifesto. It relates the most important responses to this powerful book, as well as pointing out the notions of the longue durée, the public and historians craft as the main topic that marshals the vast and diverse exchange

The purpose of this paper is an attempt to reflect on the beginnings of Ukrainian modernism. The article is an analysis of the “Open letter to Ukrainian writers” by Mykola Voronyi and his polemics with a well-known Ukrainian writer, Ivan Franko. This letter, which was published in the journal “Literaturno-Naukowy Wisnyk” in 1901, is a very important document of the epoch, bearing the mark of a literary manifesto. This little note made the Ukrainian intelligentsia aware of the crisis of so-called narodnytstvo poetics and the need for far-reaching modernization of Ukrainian literature. The writer postulated the rejection of adopted schemes in favour of the latest European trends in literature. The attempt to implement the program demands was an edition of Mykola Voronyi’s literary collection, “From the Valleys and Above the Clouds”, which has also been analyzed and discussed in this paper. The author concludes that the “Open letter to Ukrainian writers” can be considered one of the first manifestations of Ukrainian modernism

This article presents a new reading of the spoof poetic manifesto ‘Chamuły poezji’ [‘The Cads of Poetry’] written by Julian Przyboś in 1926. His use of the apocalyptic tones of early modernist poetry to lampoon a trio of acclaimed poets associated with Young Poland (especially Jan Kasprowicz) suggests a complex nature of Przyboś’s rejection and dependence on that movement. In general, the influence of Young Poland, though quite conspicuous in is juvenilia and early publications, tends to fade away. ‘Chamuły’ is a pejorative nonce word which alludes to the Biblical Ham as well as a Polish word for a cad or ill-bred bumpkin. This article adds to it another layer of meaning, based on Derrida’s interpretation of the Apocalypse, with allusions to sexual and genital imagery. And more generally, it reframes the whole Przyboś’s poetic work (not just his early poems) using Catherine Malabou’s concept of plasticity. Seen in a broader historical perspective, Przyboś’s struggles to break with Young Poland are not unlike the predicament of many eighteenth-century writers caught in the dispute between the Moderns and the Ancients, satirized in Swift’s Battle of the Books. The overall conclusion of this study is that at all times the avant-garde and the arrière-garde remain in a continuous dialogue and the innovators never lose sight of those left behind. Poetry is, after all, metamorphic and cannot be contained within within the bounds of manifestoes and artistic programmes.