Ruch Literacki

This article examines the problem of the significance of literature, not just folk literature, in Ryszard Berwiński's Studies in Folk Literature from the Historical and the Scholarly Perspective, published in Poznań in 1854. This subject was largely marginalized in discussions of this magisterial work because of what could seem as the author's inordinate preoccupation with demonology. This article looks again at his approach, which deserves a reappraisal. The discussion is divided into three parts. The first part examines the terms used by Berwiński to describe folk literature and texts that are connected with it in various ways, which for him and other 19th‑century researches constituted the essence of folklore. The second part focuses on those types of texts Berwiński regarded as crucial for the study of the sources of folk belief, while the third reviews his vision of the cultural and social role of literature in the 19th century. Together, these analyses reconstruct Berwiński's view on the functioning of literature in folklore studies and, more broadly, in the processes of the creation of a communal identity.

This article analyzes the representation of Jadwiga of Anjou, the first female monarch of Poland, crowned in 1384, and a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, in Felicjan Faleński's drama The Queen. Published in 1888, the drama features a heroine whose characterization owes a great deal to the late 19th‑century religious culture, and more specifically, the debates about Catholic modernism at the turn of the 19th century. As Felicjan Faleński was by no means unaffected by them (as shown by his Meandry, a volume of ‘unkempt’ verse, published in 1892), The Queen may be claimed to be the first modernist hagiography of Queen Jadwiga in the history of Polish literature.

This article explores the darkened and rarely visited zones of Maria Dąbrowska’s Noce i dnie [ Nights and Days] (1932–1934), a tetralogy of novels usually read as a realist family saga. In its broad panorama children and childhood have a very important place, yet what seems to have largely been ignored is the enigmatic nature of childhood and child's role as a locus of mystery. With the help of tropes of the folk imaginarium (primarily the iconic Grimms’ Fairy Tales), and conceptual tools borrowed from Sigmund Freud, Bruno Bettelheim, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, the article analyzes Dąbrowska’s multi‑layered and elusive characters, caught up in an endless strife trying in vain to tame the chaos within themselves and to get to grips with the threatening uncanniness of the world outside.

In her fiction Olga Tokarczuk evokes a spectrum of belief systems rooted in diverse religious traditions and entrenched in their literary‑theological redoubts. This article is an attempt of presenting an overview of the belief systems and worldviews that can be found in all of Tokarczuk's novels. It also examines her view of religion, including her opinions and reactions that belong primarily to the narrower context of the Polish hic and nunc, and the religious entanglements of literature. The fact that Olga Tokarczuk, herself a graduate of psychology, has done of lot reading in neighbouring fields such as anthropology may explain her persistent preoccupation with the soul. It holds the key both to her religious imaginarium and to her fictions. The empathic soul represents the potential transgressiveness of existence. It is also, in her own words, "the most tender narrator", a story‑telling 'persona' endowed with the faculty of fostering engagement and a sense of responsibility for the state of the world. The article argues that Tokarczuk's aim is to conjure up and activate its 'persona', or soul, and while making it interact with the reader's soul, initiate a chain reaction that breaks barriers between human beings, and reaches out beyond the confines of the human world. That process begins with her playing around with multiple religious traditions to demonstrate that their borders and defences are anything but impregnable.

This article deals with the ekphrastic text/image (photography) relationships in Eli, Eli, Wojciech Tochman and Grzegorz Wełnicki's 2013 reportage from the slums of the Philippine capital Manila. The photos and the ekphrastic texts form a compact whole intended to produce the effect of unvarnished truth. It is this quality, the insistence on bearing witness to the truth, no matter how shocking, that determines the genre of Eli, Eli. The counterpointal arrangement of the images and the accompanying texts open the possibility of aesthetic and ethical discord between the testimony of the photographer and that of the reporter. However, in the end such tensions reinforce and validate the truthfulness of their report. This article discusses the strategy and the techniques deployed by the authors of Eli, Eli to establish a foolproof authenticity of their work.

In 2006 Maria Janion wrote in The Uncanny Slavdom that “the new narrative of the humanities can tell the story of our culture differentlyˮ. Since that time such 'new narratives' have multiplied literally right in front of our eyes. While in the late 2000s the existence of a distinct Slavic fantasy subgenre was a matter of controversy, hotly debated by both authors and academics, today its presence and popularity is too conspicuous to leave any room for doubt. Each year the market is flooded with dozens of new Slavic fantasy books, which are then discussed in countless blogs, vlogs, discussion groups, and podcasts. The growth of interest in Slavic fantasy is phenomenal and seems to be part of a larger trend gaining ground not just in Poland but also in other Slavic nations. This gives rise to a number of questions which this article tries to address: What is Slavic fantasy? What place does it occupy in modern popular culture? What effects, beneficial or less so, will it have?