An attempt has been made to present “continuity” which, despite artists’ denials, is a prerequisite for the creation of novelty. Subsequent movements and styles (trends today) in architecture have tried to deny the ideas and forms of their predecessors. Avant-garde art distances itself from any continuation. The original does not exist even in the modern world, let alone in post-modernity. The world is filled with shapes, colours and images of the past, unable to liberate itself from it. The artists are left with a false impression of their genius and originality. Looking at the buildings built today, one can discern the unbuilt architecture of the early twentieth century. This is by no means the accusation of lack of originality, but rather the realisation of a harsh fact that it is impossible to create complete novelty. It might have been easier for our predecessors without access to the Internet and the World Library of Imagination.

The book outlines the artistic events accompanying the large sports events in 1928: the 9th Olympic Games in Amsterdam and the 1st Summer Spartakiad in Moskow and 2nd Summer Spartakiad planned in Prague, which, however, was cancelled. The organization, character, and cultural influence of these events are outlined, while selected works of art connected to these events are analysed in meticulous detail. The author points out the general differences between the Olympic Games and the Spartakiads both in the approach to sports events, and the accompanying artistic events. The Olympic Games stressed the individualistic approach to art and creative work, and encouraged international competition. The Spartakiads were aiming at collective approach to both art and sports, which were seen not as competition between nations, but a collective effort of the Proletariat.

If the characterization of avant-garde proposed once by Henri Saint Simon, and later maintained by Daniel Bell as well as Lidia Burska in the book entitled Awangarda i inne złudzenia. O pokoleniu ‘68 w Polsce (“The avant-garde and other illusions. On the ’68 generation in Poland”) is adopted, the philosophical revisionism inside Polish Marxism (the Warsaw school of the history of ideas) may be considered a phenomenon analogous to the artistic avant-garde which gained prominence in the middle of the 1950s. In Burska’s understanding, the significant trait of avant-garde is effective impact on the state of consciousness, stances and choices of the public. This essential factor highlights the connection between avant-garde and revisionism, due to the fact that, as it was commonly believed in Poland, the Warsaw school played a major role in the formation of the Polish post-war humanities. The purpose of the paper is to propose an understanding of the impact exerted by the Warsaw school of the history of ideas. In relation to this problem, the author refers to the testimonies of people who constituted that milieu, and he focuses on some topics from the hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer (the concept of the efficacy of history; the concept of application) and from the philosophy of H.R. Jauss (the concept of the horizon of expectations).

This article presents a profi le of Stanisław Jaworski as a literary scholar with a life-long involvement in avant-garde literature. He defi nes the avant-garde as a mosaic of diverse trends with no common aesthetic or ideological denominator and, at the same time, as a transcultural network of artists apparently unrelated artists. Focusing on his major studies (Foundations of the Avant-garde, Tadeusz Peiper: Writer and Theoretician, Between the Avant-garde and Surrealism, and The Avant-garde) the article reconstructs Jaworski’s insights and theoretical constructs in the context of contemporary network studies and reassesses his commitment to both history and theory of literature.

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 is an attempt to re-read Tadeusz Miciński's poem ‘Blood-red Snow’ (‘Krwawy śnieg’, 1914) in the context of a tragedy that took place in February 1914 at Zakopane, or more precisely, in Kościeliska Valley in the Tatras. It was there that Jadwiga Janczewska, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's fiancée, took her life by shooting himself in the head. Her suicide prompted Miciński, a close friend of Witkiewicz, to write the ‘Blood-red Snow’, a poetic reportage infused with ambiguity, which presents a highly subjective vision of the tragic event and its circumstances. Read out of context, the poem seems be just another product of the poet's fascination with the philosophy of the occult (Luciferianism). However, when its real-life context is restored, the heady symbolism turns out to be a camouflage of a poème à clef, a genre which ‘Blood-red Snow’ actually exemplifies. The poem is an instant reaction to a dramatic event. To make sense of it one does not need to be familiar with the whole story of the relations between Miciński and Witkiewicz. What is perhaps worth noting is that their relationship soured after Jadwiga Janczewska's suicide, which triggered an unending blame game on all sides. While the public held Witkiewicz responsible for the young woman's death, he himself put the blame on Miciński and, first and foremost, on Karol Szymanowski. These controversies are, however, beyond the scope of the 'Blood-red Snow'.

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.