Polish Studies Newsletter

Article / interview

26.06.2021

Spojrzenie z ukosa ... Russian Culture and Literature in Polish Magazines 1918-1939 (http://rossica.ibl.waw.pl)

Posted on the server of the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the database Spojrzenie z ukosa ... Russian Culture and Literature in Polish Magazines 1918-1939 (http://rossica.ibl.waw.pl) contains an issue-based bibliography of texts published in Polish magazines of the interwar period devoted to Russian issues in the broad sense: mutual cultural relations and the Polish view of Russia and its culture.

Strona główna projektu "Spojrzenie z ukosa..." (http://rossica.ibl.waw.pl/)

The database provides data on the contents of many magazines that are now forgotten or poorly accessible, but above all it attempts to reconstruct the paradigms of narration on Polish-Russian relations that dominated in the interwar period. It also allows for a review of the current state of knowledge about both the causes of Polish-Russian conflicts, the determinants of Russophobia or Polish Russophilia, which has been pushed out of consciousness, and the processes of shaping Polish national identity of that period. It allows us to find an answer to the question to what extent Russian issues were present in the Polish culture of the time, both high and popular, and how the image of Russia, Russian people and Russian culture functioned in the consciousness of the time.

The periodicals studied included magazines, newspapers, and Polish weeklies of the interwar period, containing information on Russian culture, literature, art, and Polish-Russian cultural contacts. More than fifty national and regional literary, socio-literary, and political-social periodicals - weeklies, biweeklies, monthlies, and quarterlies - have been fully autopsied. Among the periodicals studied, one can find the largest national magazines, such as "Wiadomości Literackie", "Skamander" or "Tygodnik Ilustrowany", but also much smaller ones, containing a lot of interesting material. These would include, among others. These include the weekly magazines "Czarno na białem", "Marchołt", "Czerwona Róża", the Katowice monthly "Fantana", "Kuźnica", the Warsaw biweekly "Głos Literacki", the Lvov weekly "Nurt", and "Nowe Czasy"; Problemy Europy Wschodniej" ("Problems of Eastern Europe") by Włodzimierz Bączkowski; "Zet" ("Zet") by Jerzy Braun; "Wschód-Orient" ("East-Orient") by Jerzy Giedroyc; the Poznan radical-nationalist "Głos" ("Voice") by Jan Wyganowski, "Myśl Narodowa" ("National Thought") by Józef Wierzejski, "Państwo Pracy" ("Workers' State") - the organ of the Legion of Youth, "Kultura Słowiańska" ("Slavic Culture") - a Warsaw biweekly devoted to the problems of the Slavic nations, and "Natio" ("Natio") - a periodical devoted to national issues in Poland. Among the dailies, several titles were fully analyzed, such as "Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny", "Echo Wieczorne" from Łódź, "Gazeta Lwowska", "Goniec Krakowski", "Rzeczpospolita", "Robotnik", "Czas".
The importance of the Russian subject matter in the interwar Polish press is evidenced by the names of the authors dealing with the subject matter. At that time such great authors as Józef Czechowicz, Teodor Parnicki and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Teodor Bujnicki, Witold Wandurski, Józef Łobodowski wrote about Russian culture; the founders of pre-war Polish humanities, to mention only the outstanding Slavist Aleksander Brückner, rector of Vilnius University, philosopher Marian Zdziechowski, Franciszek Siedlecki, Bogumił Jasinowski, or such ambassadors of Russian culture as Karol Wiktor Zawodziński, Wacław Lednicki, Sergiusz Kułakowski, Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski, Rafał Blüth, Paweł Ettinger. The Russian issues were written about by the activists of various political groups, artists of extremely different world views, e.g: Antoni Ferdynand Ossendowski, Ferdynand Goetel, Stefan Żeromski, Antoni Słonimski, Władysław Broniewski, Mieczysław Bohdan Lepecki, Melchior Wańkowicz, Stanisław Mackiewicz-Cat, Jerzy Stempowski, Jan Kucharzewski, Anatol Stern, Jan Parandowski, Andrzej Niemojewski, Wincenty Lutosławski, Stanisław Grabski.

The database contains over 13,000 entries. It contains information on critical, polemical and review articles, also those of minor importance; information on reviews, press and publishing notes, on mentions of Russian literature, science, culture and art; information on cultural events and initiatives undertaken by Polish (and Russian) society, on their course, popularity and audience reactions; as well as notes on Russian literary texts (originals and translations). Also included are major articles on social issues, history, and Polish-Russian political relations. Iconographic materials are also indexed if the publications were accompanied by illustrative material (this applies in particular to satirical writings, but also to reportages enriched with photographs or reviews of theatrical performances, films and exhibitions dealing with Russian themes).

The database is supplemented by full-text materials published in Lectorium.


The database has been created as part of the project Sideways reflections...  funded by the National Science Center in 2013-2019. Russian culture and literature through the eyes of Poles (on the material of Polish periodicals of the interwar period). Development of bibliographic online database with a collection of selected full-text publications (No. 2012/07/E/HS2/03861).

 

See also

11.06.2019

Art in the Places of Death. An interview with Prof. Halina Taborska

"Halina Taborska's book (...) is a peculiar study of the aesthetics of an anti-humanistic act. In fact it introduces such "aesthetics" to the readers, and we are presented with a very carefully prepared documentation of various objects, material and spatial shapes, "installations", murals, museum organizations and documentary activities. These are various shapes in the public space which mediate our perception of an unimaginable crime or "blinding” shapes that protect us from the damages of seeing it again. By bringing this collection of practices together, the book shows their character and multiplicity. The research material gathered in the publication and the scholarly approach make it a must-read not only in the study of war crimes in Europe, but also in the study of symbolic representation of mass crimes - especially in the field of cultural studies, cultural anthropology and art history.” (Prof. Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw - excerpt from the review on the cover).

25.10.2019

GRANASLAVIC 2019, "Jornadas Andaluzas de Eslavística”

The Slavic conference, which took place on July 9-11, 2019 at the Translation Department of the University of Granada in Spain, can be without hesitation described as one of the hottest scientific events of this summer. The attraction was not only the place itself - not without reason, the old Spanish proverb says that whoever did not see Grenada did not see anything - but also the subject matter; it should be noted that the last conference organized by the section of Slavic philology of the local university took place in 2014 - and who knows, maybe we’ll wait next five years for another edition?

03.09.2024

Interview with Prof. Anna Frajlich, Senior Lecturer, Emerita of the Department of Slavic Languages at Columbia University

Professor Anna Frajlich, a renowned poet with impressive dossier of achievements, who left Poland in 1969 because of the anti-Semitic campaign, has lived in New York for years. Here, at the Slavic Studies Department of New York University, she defended her doctoral thesis on the legacy of ancient Rome in the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, and for 34 years, from 1982 to 2016, she was a lecturer at the Slavic Studies Department of Columbia University. Currently, retired for eight years, she continues to actively participate in American and Polish literary life, taking part in meetings, conferences, and talks. One of them was conducted by Przemysław Górecki in the New York apartment of the professor and her husband.

01.10.2019

100th anniversary of “Biblioteka Narodowa” (National Library of Poland) book series

This year marks the 100th  anniversary of the creation of "The National Library of Poland" - the oldest and best known literary series in Poland. So far, it has published 605 volumes of the most valuable works of Polish and world literature in exemplary, professional and accessible studies, which came from the pens of the best Polish literary scholars.

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