This article presents the concept of fate in the stories of the poet and literary sketches of twentieth-century Russian writer Jurij Dombrowski. The writer creates psychological portraits of Romantic poets, including George Byron, Alexander Gribojedov, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, focusing on selected episodes from their lives. In the article attempt is made to prove that the fate of the nineteenth-century artists serve as an excuse to explain the problems of contemporary author. Characteristics of historical fi gures are made through the prism of Dombrowski’s biography. The combination of biography and autobiography allows Dombrowski to present the subjective concept of the poet: a man condemned to loneliness and misunderstanding, confl icted with the epoch, trying to overcome the tragic dependence on historical conditions through art and creativity.
This article examines two collections of manuscripts (previously unanalyzed) with poems which make up Leopold Staff’s debut volume The Dreams of Power. The poet offered them as a gift to Maryla Wolska who deposited them in the Michał Pawlikowski Archives at Medyka. With access to the fi rst, nearly complete, collection we can get an insight into the process of selecting poems for the version that was to go to print (1899–1901). As most of the poems are dated, we are able to establish their sequence and reconstruct the changing concept of their selection. Of special value are twelve poems which had been dropped in the process, and for most part remained unpublished. Each of them is presented briefl y in the article. Apart from making this discovery, the article demonstrates that Leopold Staff’s debut volume as we know it had an earlier version with a set of poems, different from the one that was earmarked for publication under that title.
This article examines the relationship of Maryla Wolska with the poets and artists of the Young Poland in Lwów and, more broadly, with the literary community of the early 20th century. She was a leading light of Płanetnicy (The Rainmakers), an informal group of artists who met at her house in Lwów. The role of a friend and mate, someone who was treated equally as a writer, did not sit well, however, with her role as mistress of the house, hostess of a literary salon and representative of a family which occupied a high position in the social hierarchy. To ride on the crest of the wave she strove to combine two strategies, a modern jauntiness and a studious attention to 19th-century proprieties. Although she did well for herself, her success was by no means complete.
This article brings together two authors/two poems and makes them enter into an intertextual dialogue that involves the discourses of the new materialism (Catherine Malabou), postphenomenology (Natalie Depraz and Marc Richir) and Delphic maxims. Concepts like plasticity, transformation masks, alterations in the passage of time (chronos, kairos, aeon), subjectivity, emotional excess, and the living body are used to establish the foundations a poetic conversation, which, for all one knows, may be fortuitous or in a way preordained.