After a brief period of relative plurality in postwar Polish literature, the Szczecin Congress of the Polish Writers’ Union in 1949 made socialist realism the binding doctrine.1 This was followed by a period of Stalinist indoctrination in Polish culture. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the first signs of dissolution became apparent; in October 1956, a political turnaround occurred, which also brought about a liberalization of cultural life.2 In this article, I examine how Polish intellectuals in the period after October 1956 reflected on the place of literature in a socialist society. At the center of these debates was the genre of the novel: It enjoyed the greatest circulation, had the greatest entertainment value—and was believed to provide the greatest insight into the issue of representation and interpretation of ‘society’ in literature. Although socialist realism was no longer the binding model, the claim to ‘totality’ in the representation of society postulated in Marxist literary theory3 still reverberated in the theoretical debates of the late 1950s and the 1960s.
The coercive imposition of a binding literary and aesthetic doctrine on the Soviet model (zhdanovshchina) was, of course, not a specifically Polish phenomenon—it affected all societies of the newly formed “Eastern Bloc” in one way or another. But the Polish case is specific in that there had already been attempts in the prewar period to develop a literature that would both represent and change society.4 I will break the conventional perspective on the topic here by relating the reflections of literary theorists and critics to a specifically Polish tradition of sociological evaluation of para-literary texts, namely the sociology of the “human document,” founded by Florian Znaniecki (1882–1958). The importance of this lineage for debates in postwar Polish literary theory and criticism has been widely neglected so far. I will show that even before the Second World War, there were considerations and also practical projects in Poland that sought to achieve social inclusion via literature: The memoirs of peasants and the unemployed were expected to shed light on the problems of Polish society and, above all, to provide a solution to these problems. This tradition lived on in the postwar period, but its methodological foundations had to be concealed, because Znaniecki’s sociology was considered “idealistic” and thus unacceptable from a Marxist point of view.
Even in the interwar years, there was talk of the “epic” dimension of the memoir projects. The epic “ambition to depict the totality of society”5 remained the latent reference point of the debates about the novel in the postwar period. I will trace this line by first evaluating writings on the novel by sociologist Józef Chałasiński (1904–1979) and then relating them to the reflections of literary scholars and critics such as Stefan Żółkiewski (1911–1991), Andrzej Kijowski (1928–1985), and Tomasz Burek (1938–2017). It will turn out that the paradigm of ‘totality’ successively moves away from its concrete sociological reference until it is finally replaced by a late modern utopia of the aesthetic as expressed in the concept of the “masterpiece” advocated above all by Kijowski and Burek.
1 The Literary Background of Polish Sociology
Polish novelists and literary critics of the early twentieth century, such as Bolesław Prus (1847–1912), Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911) or Stefan Żeromski (1864–1925), were keenly interested in the social thought of their times. This concern for sociological issues found its counterpart in the literary orientation of famous Polish social scientists of that era. These were not only avid readers of novels, but were actually highly interested in the contribution of literature to the knowledge about society, individual psychology, and communication. Ludwik Krzywicki (1859–1941), a key figure in the history of Polish sociology, contributed insightful critical essays on contemporary literature to the newspaper “Prawda” (“Truth”) in the 1880s; Edward Abramowski (1868–1918), a famous psychologist and social activist, actually wrote literary texts,6 and the abovementioned Florian Znaniecki, the founder of the Polish, ‘humanistic’ school of empirical social research, developed his research method based on textual genres that with good reasons can be considered as falling under the purview of literary criticism—letters and autobiographies—or “personal documents,” as he had it.
Znaniecki held a PhD in philosophy from Jagiellonian University (Cracow). Right before the outbreak of the First World War, he moved to Chicago where he worked together with the sociologist William Isaac Thomas (1863–1947): Their five-volume work The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, published in 1918–1920, was a groundbreaking study in the sociology of migration and generally in qualitative microsociological research. Its impact on the development of the discipline of sociology in the United States was rather temporary; however, its influence in Polish culture of the twentieth century can hardly be overrated, exceeding by far the boundaries of the academic discipline of sociology.
In 1920, Znaniecki received a professorship at the University of Poznań where he founded the Polish Sociological Institute (Polski Instytut Socjologiczny). Fortunately, he was outside of Poland when the Second World War broke out; he emigrated to the United States for good and became a professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Due to his emigration, Znaniecki did not play any role in postwar Polish sociology; however, the methods he had established had left their mark on Polish culture and the soil he had prepared turned out to be fruitful even for the building of a new socialist culture in the years after the Second World War.
2 A New Epic? Lower-Class Writing and Social Inclusion in Poland, 1920–1939
Znaniecki’s research, which consisted in analyzing social attitudes of individuals and social relations on the basis of ‘personal documents’ (letters, memoirs), had unleashed a wave of autobiographical writing during the interwar period in Poland.7 Znaniecki’s Institute organized competitions in order to produce materials for sociological research. From the beginning, the focus was on the lower classes, typically workers and peasants.
This would not be worth mentioning had the phenomenon of writing diaries and memoirs not spread beyond sociology. In the 1930s, diary or autobiography competitions were highly popular. In its first edition, dedicated to the literary production of 1932, the prestigious “Rocznik Literacki” (“Literary Yearbook”) included a chapter on the new genre.8 And who knows, maybe even such a strictly literary work as Witold Gombrowicz’s Memoirs from the Time of Adolescence (Pamiętnik z okresu dojrzewania, 1933) would have had a different title had it not been for the general boom of memoir-writing in the 1930s.
In 1937, the second series of Memories of Peasants (Pamiętniki chłopów: Serja druga),9 which were produced in the framework of a project conducted by the Institute of Social Economy under the guidance of Ludwik Krzywicki, won the most prestigious literary award in Poland. The famous writer Maria Dąbrowska (1889–1965), a member of the jury (who was also an activist of the cooperative movement in interwar Poland), had proposed this work. In a statement published in “Wiadomości Literackie” (“Literary News”), she explained her support by the “extraordinary artistic value” of the texts—even though these initially had not been intended to be works of art. She elaborated: “Epic skill in painting the environment, philosophical reflections reaching the ultimate questions of being, observational skills—these are the qualities of the Memoirs of Peasants.”10 All these are characteristic features of the novel. The adjective “epic” is of course of particular interest in this regard. First and foremost, it stresses the storytelling talents of the peasant authors; beyond that it evokes the issue of the novel as a modern successor of or alternative to the epic. It is well-known but nevertheless highly telling that the relationship between the novel and the epic was discussed at the same time some thousand kilometers further eastwards in Moscow, where György Lukács wrote about the novel as the bourgeois successor of the epic and the possible role of the socialist realist novel as a new epic.11 Dąbrowska, in her statement in “Literary News,” particularly stressed the socially integrative potential of the Memoirs of Peasants. They would help strengthen the social cohesion in Polish society, by assuring a contact between “intellectual culture” and “village culture,” she wrote.12 This abyss between the modern urban intellectual and elite culture and the traditionalist lower class culture of the village was widely perceived as the most difficult challenge for Polish society during the interwar period.13
Dąbrowska, who like Znaniecki and Krzywicki came from a family of the Polish landed gentry, discussed the needs and problems of a modernizing society and she used concepts from the theory of literature—the novel and the epic—in their potential to represent social reality and to help the society in question to come to terms with its problems. She underscored that Polish society was divided and that now, for the first time, the Polish peasants got to speak for themselves14 and their voice was present in the intelligentsia discourse of literary and cultural criticism of which he had been excluded until then. This exclusion was all the more problematic because the peasants were an essential, maybe even the essential part of the very concept of society put forward in this discourse.15 These two poles—the history of the genre of the novel and social reality, as imagined by intellectuals—are the essential poles for the discussions I will analyze here.
When in postwar-Poland intellectuals searched for ways to develop a non-elitist, comprehensive model of culture that was not exclusively based on the legacy of the Polish landed gentry and the intelligentsia but would include as well the peasants and the working class, they could at least theoretically resort to this specifically Polish tradition of sociological research. Of course, from the standpoint of Marxist-Leninist Orthodoxy, this was rather problematic. Still it is important to note that the generation of intellectuals who were active in the debates of the 1950s and 1960s had grown up in a society where lower-class writing was cultivated and promoted—at least by a considerable number of sociologists and writers—as a vehicle for social inclusion.16 It is also noteworthy that this was a two-sides movement. There even had been attempts at constructing a Polish “proletarian literature” in interwar Poland, a literature that would say farewell to petit-bourgeois fictions and fantasies and would address the real needs of the working class.17
3 Józef Chałasiński’s Take on the Novel and the Society of Postwar Poland
Józef Chałasiński, a student and follower of Znaniecki, became a professor of sociology at the University of Łódź after the war. He was a highly influential figure in the social sciences of socialist Poland. Chałasiński continued the tradition of Znaniecki’s research and credited him in his works, even in the years after the war when this was not politically advisable.
Chałasiński was highly sensitive to the issues of social mobility, inequality, and class—and he paid much attention to the social class that was at least quantitatively dominant in Polish society in the 1930s—the peasantry. He had been a student first of mathematics and then linguistics at Poznan University, when Znaniecki convinced him to become a social scientist. Chałasiński’s intellectual background was not Marxist, but the topics of his research and the reputation he had earned by his publications in the years before the war made it relatively easy for him to meet the ideological requirements prevailing in the new socialist state. In 1946 he published a book on the Social Genealogy of the Polish Intelligentsia (Społeczna genealogia inteligencji polskiej) where he quoted his teacher Znaniecki, somewhat provocatively asking his readers to show him a “Marxist that would have shed as much light on the social structure of the Polish intelligentsia” as the “ ‘idealist’ Znaniecki” had done in his “subtle” works on the topic.18
For Chałasiński the problem of conceptualizing a new, egalitarian culture was familiar territory. In this process, he ascribed a particular importance to literature in general and the novel in particular. Chałasiński was well aware of the extraordinary status of novelists in the circles of the Polish intelligentsia at the end of the nineteenth century.19 In fact, as he stated in a later essay, the novelist enjoyed a specific authority—and novel-writing, journalism, and political activism often went hand in hand: “[…] novel writing and journalism were fundamental institutions of the Polish intelligentsia and of Polish national culture.”20 This goes not only for prewar Polish literature,21 but also and perhaps even more so for the new culture of postwar, communist Poland.
Chałasiński was very much interested in the novel. In an article Problems of Contemporary Culture (Z zagadnień kultury współczesnej), he refers to discussions about the novel and quotes the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who, at a congress in Geneva in 1955, had diagnosed the decline of the “the great French novel,” as compared to its heyday in the nineteenth century.22 The French realist novel, Balzac and Stendhal above all, had been the model for György Lukács’s reflections on the novel as the bourgeois epic.23 As a historian of the Polish intelligentsia, Chałasiński considered the “novelist” to be the “leading humanist” of the nineteenth century—“humanist” (humanista) referring to both, the extent of his knowledge about social matters and to his social commitment. And although much had changed since, Chałasiński was astonished to find that the novel was still relevant, even to the members of the working class. “Why does the working class of the socialist countries read old novels?,” he asked and, “What does it look for in the contemporary novel?”24
Chałasiński acknowledged that the crucial challenge the new, socialist Polish state had to face was the inclusion of peasants and workers into the sphere of culture. This process implied a fundamental transformation of this very culture. It could no longer be exclusively elite, bourgeois (or landed-gentry) culture: “The awakening of new interests and cultural aspirations that accompanies the social and political mobility, as well as the personal models according to which these interests and aspirations are formed, is an appealing issue.”25 Interestingly, Chałasiński saw the novel as the key to these new models:
Why the novel? The answer is simple. The subject of the novel in its classical, realistic nineteenth-century form is the concrete man of the age in his personal relation to all manifestations of life, society and culture. What Rabelais is to the Renaissance, Stendhal, Balzac or Zola are to the following periods of capitalism. The entire cycle of human life was reflected in the novel. The culture of the epoch acted in it as a regulator, which shaped the human personality and at the same time expressed it. […] From this point of view, the nineteenth-century novel is an irreplaceable cultural document in which, by the hand of the writer, culture wrote its history and at the same time the history of the man whom it shaped. Nowhere else, except in the novel, in memoirs and in epistolography, has there been such a comprehensive reflection of the connection between society and the heritage of culture and the motivations of the actions and thoughts of the individual man in his active attitude to all manifestations of life, to his own class and to the classes of others, to his own work and to his own person. Ludwik Gumplowicz was right when he paid tribute to Eliza Orzeszkowa on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of her work, writing that “her novels are a great treasury, not only of art, which does not know a higher aim than to reproduce reality and truth, but also an invaluable collection of materials for sociology.”26
Chałasiński posits that the novel can be considered a more elaborate version of non-fictional and non-artistic forms of communication, such as epistolography or the personal diary.27 This also implies that there is a functional link between the ‘personal document’ that had served as the basis for Znaniecki’s and Chałasiński’s sociological research during the 1920s and 1930s, and the contemporary novel—at least in theory. In contemporary Poland, the novelist will probably no longer (or should no longer) exclusively come from the social elite (the intelligentsia), but should be of a peasant or working-class background.28 Or as Ehrenburg said about the Soviet novel: “[…] it is sometimes more interesting and more human in certain regards, because it does not show individual cases, not the folds of the heart of a few isolated individuals, but the life of the people.”29
There are striking affinities between the empirical method of Znaniecki’s and Chałasiński’s ‘humanistic sociology’ and the theory of socialist realism (one should of course not forget that the latter was only possible through state intervention in the field of literature—and in the climate of postwar Stalinist terror). Although both focus on individual cases, they claim to provide general insight in the functioning of society.30 And both are dealing with protagonists of working class or peasant background. These affinities notwithstanding, Chałasiński was of course aware of the fact that Znaniecki’s sociological method was not acceptable in a Marxist context: Znaniecki’s research, says Chałasiński in a self-critical article in 1951, was based on the presumption that society could be adequately analysed through “interpersonal relations” and “interpersonal psychology.”31 In his own seminal study The Young Generation of Peasants (Młode pokolenie chłopów), published in four volumes in 1938, Chałasiński had written that, “Changes in the social structure consist not in technical-economic changes, but in changes in the organization of attitudes and values.”32 This focus on personal relations and individual psychology is close to the poetics of the novels of nineteenth-century realism—hence the tribute paid to literature and more specifically to the novel as a source of sociological material in Znaniecki’s and Chałasiński’s writings of the 1930s.33 However, in Stalinist Poland, Chałasiński saw himself forced to concede that this understanding of the structure of society, “borrowed from Znaniecki’s philosophy of culture,” as he admitted, was very much marked by idealism.34 Yet, the sensitivity for non-material issues, such as values, personal stances and attitudes, that is at the core of Znaniecki’s “culturalist” sociology, remains, in my view, productive even in Chałasiński’s postwar texts; this current is constantly present in his writings and could hence easily be revived during the period of liberalization from 1956 onwards.
It is precisely the novel that gives access to personal attitudes, interpersonal relations and, as a genre, even assures a connection between contemporary readers and past epochs. This is why, for Chałasiński, it was the crucial genre in Polish postwar society. He was, of course, not the only intellectual of the time to find that the novel had to play a crucial role in communist Poland. The first years after the war had been marked by fierce polemics about the form and style of the realist novel, but the events of the year 1956—the death of Bolesław Bierut in Moscow in March, strikes and mass demonstrations in Poznań in June, and finally the election of Władysław Gomułka as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party—had fundamentally changed the situation. Chałasiński’s return to the novel in his post-1956 writings was also an attempt to rehabilitate certain features of his sociological research in interwar Poland.
4 Between Socialist Realism and Modernism: Stefan Żółkiewski
After the upheavals of the Polish October of 1956 and the end of the Stalinist period in cultural politics, Polish literary scholarship was, for good reasons, mostly oriented towards a structuralist or phenomenological take on the theory of the novel, questions of composition, of narrative, of time and space, etc.35 Here, however, I would like to examine the latent persistence of a line of thought that attributes to the novel a key role in social self-reflection and even social cohesion in socialist Poland. I am interested in theoretical conceptualizations of the novel that explore the relationship between the novel and society; this is often a rather implicit theory. Stefan Żółkiewski is s particularly revealing case in this context. He was probably the most influential and authoritative literary theorist in the first two decades of postwar Poland; he published countless books and articles on issues of contemporary literature and culture, on the reorganization of cultural life in communist Poland and, what is most interesting, on the theoretical and ideological foundations of this reorganization. Żółkiewski was a co-founder and the first director (1948–1952) of the famous IBL (Instytut Badań Literackich), the Institute of Literary Studies, a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers Party until 1968, and even served as minister of higher education from 1956 to 1959. Although he was “one of the builders of the Stalinist order in Poland, one of the promoters of the Stalinization of Polish culture,”36 and certainly one of the most influential voices in the controversies of the postwar years, Żółkiewski was as well a refined spirit, open to modernist tendencies, avant-garde literature and latest developments in philosophy and social and cultural theory, not only from Poland or Russia, but from all over the world. He did not let himself be confined to the usual suspects of Marxism-Leninism, quoting quite freely and always competently from the works of Talcott Parsons, Karl Raimund Popper, Raymond Aron, Antonio Gramsci, Jean-Paul Sartre, René Girard, and others.
After 1956, the generation of intellectuals that had actively contributed to the Stalinist gleichschaltung of Polish culture had to cautiously distance themselves from the ideological excesses of the postwar period if they did not want to lose their credibility. Żółkiewski, however, did not adopt a defensive posture; instead he tried to save the idea of socialist realism.37 His goal was a real socialist realism, not the orthodox, Zhdanovian version he had himself helped establish and that he now called “narrow, scholastic,” and “wrong.”38 This revised socialist realism should be comprehensive and include inspirations from artistic currents that were rejected by Soviet orthodoxy, such as futurism, expressionism, constructivism. It was a re-historicized socialist realism that would reflect on its own historical development,39 a socialist realism in the making, not one developed from scratch in the cabinets of bureaucrats—as it had been done in the Soviet Union in the beginning of the 1930s and then again in Poland in 1949, when, according to Żółkiewski, the public announcement of “Socialist Realism” as the mandatory literary program had actually impaired the “true development of a socialist literature” in Poland.40 This was the reason why, in Poland, the term “socialist realism” was usually associated with works no one would like to read again and that were hence useless in every regard, since these works “did not tell the truth about our contradictions, conflicts, and even about our crimes.”41 It should be noted, however, that in this attempt to save the concept of Socialist realism, Żółkiewski deliberately ignored the fact that from 1956 onwards, the very notion of “socialist realism” had lost most of its appeal.42
Nevertheless, socialist realism remained the officially binding doctrine. This was reminded by none other than Władysław Gomułka himself at a plenary session of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party on July 4, 1963. In his speech, the First Secretary spoke out against “schematic” literature—an easily decipherable periphrasis for the excesses of socialist realism in the era of Stalinism—and made it clear that while the Party did not want to interfere directly in questions of artistic creation it nevertheless particularly supported socialist realism.43 Żółkiewski had to take such guidelines into account, however paradoxical they were.
In his book on The Culture of Popular Poland (O kulturze Polski Ludowej), published in 1964, Żółkiewski points out that literature is about the authenticity of experience and about the appropriateness of the artistic means used to express this experience.44 In his attempt to construct a consistent narrative of the recent history of cultural politics in socialist Poland, he rewrites this history, stating that, in the first years after the war, “party and state” had chosen not to impose their “own version of realism—quite the contrary,” they had “boldly accepted innovative models that had been spontaneously created on the wave of calculated experiences.”45 And this “ideological and artistic avant-garde, that expressed the experiences [przeżycia] and the stances of people engaged in the progress of their time,” had been “a real, strong foundation for this politics.”46 So there actually had been, in the chaotic postwar years, an authentic and spontaneous realism, based on “real” experiences. This realism had later, “in the [early] 1950s,” been suppressed by the “artificial, invented formulas” and “rigid recipes” of “some other realism.”47 This “other realism” was of course the Stalinist, the “bad one.” From 1956 onwards, Żółkiewski points out, it was possible to tie in with the authentic realism of the first postwar years. This revitalized and further developed realism was a complicated construct—it was spontaneous but also “rationally guided” and empirically based.48 The problem was now not only to tear down the boundaries between mass culture and elite culture, but also to prevent “mass culture” from becoming tandeta, i.e., trash—which is what Żółkiewski considered to be happening to mass culture in the capitalist countries. The way out of this dilemma is no longer the party line, but: klasycyzacja,—a “classicisation” of culture, the orientation towards great models, great authors, great books.49
In the chapter The Main Problem of Contemporary Literature from his 1965 book Problems of Style (Zagadnienia stylu), Żółkiewski emphasized the formative importance of the masterpiece (arcydzieło) for contemporary Polish literature. The masterpiece as a concept assures historical continuity; by its lasting value, it transcends the framework of contemporary culture. This value cannot be explained by its timelessness—this would be the bourgeois, idealist approach—but precisely by its constantly renewed functioning in ever new generations.50 At the same time, the masterpiece has to assure a connection between the readers and their real historical experience—it should combine both the authenticity of experience and its super-individual, collective relevance.
As Żółkiewski pointed out later, the war and the Nazi-occupation had made Polish society more egalitarian: “In the camps, the prisons, doing forced labor, in partisan units, peasants and workers were mixed with people from the intelligentsia. They experienced a fate common to all Poles.”51 It is also the experience of the period of the occupation that served as an argument for Żółkiewski when he rejected the value of individual social relations (“you and I”)—these had been the basis for Znaniecki’s and Chałasiński’s sociological research. “The experiences of the occupation period debunk this philosophy,”52 said Żółkiewski—the individuals that took part in the conflicts between victims and perpetrators were always more than just individuals, they represented (from the start) groups and group interests. Here is a point that shows that literary criticism had to find a way to integrate real historical experience. And we can guess that the epic approach of socialist realism would by definition be more appropriate here than the individualistic point of view of the psychological (bourgeois) novel.
Finally, one of the reasons for the flourishing of the idea of a great, comprehensive novel that would embrace all the spheres of society might be the fact that a whole generation of readers, could not buy or borrow any new literature during the period of the Nazi-occupation, but had to read what they found in their private libraries: “I never read as much Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy as during the years of the occupation,” remembers Żółkiewski.53 This last quote is from a piece written in 1976—after the disappointments of 1968, when Żółkiewski lost his chair at University of Warsaw, was transferred to the Academy of Sciences and was no longer in charge of official cultural politics.
5 Longing for the Masterpiece: The Novel as a Vanishing Point for Utopia (Andrzej Kijowski, Tomasz Burek)
So far, I analyzed how sociologists and literary theorists singled out the novel as the crucial literary genre that would be able to provide an access to experience—this experience, as shaped and stored by the novel, would no longer be ephemeral or confined to subjectivity, but stable and collective. Now I would like to pursue the notion of “masterpiece” that so strangely accompanies the literary critics’ and theorists’ reflections on the role of the novel. As I pointed out, the notion comes up in Żółkiewski’s writings. It implies above all a hierarchy of values: for Żółkiewski it was evident that one had to find a balance between the different levels of culture, but “never downwards.”54 In this, he remained true to the “ethos of the Polish intelligentsia.”55 Socialist mass culture has to assure the “full development of one’s personality” to all members of society.56 This is why the notion of “experience” is so crucial for Żółkiewski: capitalist mass culture compensates for alienated work and is thus itself a form of alienation.57 Socialist mass culture by contrast has to express real, authentic experience—and should probably include also the experience of those who did not have any private libraries at their disposal during the Second World War.
Interestingly, the masterpiece, with its implicit reference to “classical” values, is not only an important concept in the framework of post-Hegelian and/or Marxist theory; it also plays a crucial role in the writings of arguably non-Marxist or at least “anti-party Marxist” literary critics, such as Andrzej Kijowski and Tomasz Burek.58 In the years between 1956 and 1968, the discourse of literary criticism, particularly when it came to the novel, was very much marked by the search for the masterpiece. This issue has been addressed by Maciej Urbanowski in an article from 2014 entitled The Appetite for the Masterpiece in Polish Literary Criticism after 1945 (Kijowski—Burek—Wencel).59 Unfortunately, Urbanowski does not take the historical dimension of the notion of the masterpiece into account at all. For him, the masterpiece is a work of art that transcends history—and he even goes so far as to deny that this transcendence can be explained historically. The continuity of values that for him guarantees the steady superior status of the “masterpiece” in a given culture must be seen as a metaphysical given, something similar to Platonic ideas.
Urbanowski rightly points out that the notion of “masterpiece” in the critical discourse of the 1950s and 1960s was most often accompanied by qualifiers such as “incomplete, unfulfilled, unknown.” The literary critics typically expressed a “longing” (their own or the public’s) for this not-yet-accomplished work that would fulfil all their wishes.60 The ultimate point of reference of the discussion about the masterpiece is a utopian one. The masterpiece exists only in potentiality. Powieść, której nie ma (The Novel that Doesn’t Exist), is the title of the first essay in Kijowski’s famous collection Arcydzieło nieznane (The Unknown Masterpiece) from 1964.61 It goes without saying that this non-existence can be blamed on the fatal conditions of biographical, historical, or cultural nature that prevent(ed) the masterpiece from coming into being: the quest for the masterpiece implies a critical reckoning with Polish postwar culture.
Andrzej Kijowski’s handling of the category of “masterpiece” was not very systematic as we can easily see from the examples collected by Urbanowski. For Kijowski, the masterpiece is a kind of label that he ascribed or did not ascribe to certain texts—some of them commonly acknowledged as of classical value, some of them not. In Kijowski’s criticism, the “masterpiece” is above all an instrument in the hands of the literary critic that serves to attribute literary and cultural value. Somewhat overextending his concept, Kijowski goes so far as to say that literary criticism in general is nothing but “the theory of the masterpiece,” whereas literary theory should deal with literary communication in general.62 Even if it is not real, the masterpiece can be intuitively anticipated or rather “pre-felt” by the critic.63 This is why the criteria that make a text a “masterpiece” are somewhat blurry: they are ultimately based on the critic’s intuition and thus his unquestioned authority in matters of aesthetics. Kijowski uses religious terms, speaks of a “revelation” or even a “wonder.”64 The discourse of revelation may be seen as a self-empowerment in a Marxist-Leninist context where truth is always already at hand and merely needs to be ritually invoked in conventionalized argumentative practices.
To deplore the unsatisfactory quality of the contemporary novel is a critical strategy for Kijowski. He complains that contemporary novels simply “bore him to death.” And at the same time, he dreams of an entirely different, yet unwritten novel,
Dying like this [of boredom], I dream of a novel that I would read with blazes on my face. I dream of this novel even when I say that no one will ever write it, that it does not need to be written, that it is impossible to write it. I dream of the novel of my time, of my generation, of my biographical and intellectual formation, because, as a matter of fact, I cannot imagine literature (and culture in general) without the novel, and I cannot accept that my generation does not leave behind a novelistic monument, that it does not see itself transformed into a novel.65
In The Unknown Masterpiece, Kijowski half-jocularly “orders” a novel.66 It should represent the “unrepresented” world of Polish society, it is the ultimate and impossible surrogate for sociology and cultural criticism.
The masterpiece is the point of culmination in Kijowski’s idea of literary criticism. It is telling to see how it developed. In his grand critical overviews of the annual production of novels in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kijowski had (of course) taken a distanced stance on the “schematic” and “simplistic” literature of socialist realism and on the “cultural terror” of the recent years,67 but he was not at all satisfied with the novelistic production of the Thaw era and criticized it for its “lack of ambition” and “creative idleness.”68 What he missed was a “philosophy,”69 i.e., a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between history and individual fate, between society and individual psychology. This means that he missed a truly epic approach in the contemporary Polish novel. Kijowski saw contemporaneity as something ephemeral, which it is, of course—but what is so striking about Kijowski’s literary criticism of the late 1950s and early 1960s is that he systematically referred to the grand historical perspective as the only way to reach a “creative synthesis” of what was happening in Polish society.70
Kijowski’s criticism operates with an implicit theory about the necessary connection between individual fate and history in the novel. He does not formulate this theory in detail, he rather refers to it as given, but it is nevertheless clear that a “great” novel, i.e., a novel that meets the standards of literary criticism and theory, must be based on a coherent and comprehensive understanding of the individual’s embeddedness in the historical process. Otherwise Kijowski would reject it as superficial, mere “journalism” with its accent on “details” and “particularities.”71 Kijowski’s “historical perspective” is not Marxist, it is rather crypto-Hegelian in the sense that he demands a work of fiction to rely on a comprehensive understanding of history, on some kind of “historiosophical conception.”72
Tomasz Burek, who became a major voice in Polish literary criticism during the 1960s and was very influential in intellectual circles in the 1970s and 1980s, followed Kijowski in the quest for the masterpiece in contemporary Polish literature. As Kijowski, Burek uses the notion of masterpiece as an unrealized ideal that a literary work can come close to; but this asymptotic rapprochement seems to be all that is possible under the current cultural and political conditions. Just as Kijowski, Burek focuses on contemporary prose writing.73 His reference is the novel above all—the novel as the genre that can transgress itself, that, at least theoretically, can aspire to attain totality in its grasp of psychological, social, historical experience:74
[…] thus, the novel no longer wants to be a good novel, a true work of art, the novel does not want to be itself, it turns against itself, denies its own essence, wants to be something else, something closer to human existence with its inertia, suffering and misery, closer to the bare fact of existence, to life itself; the story of life wants to be life itself, a part of it, its sob, its fantasy, its fury, its intoxication, its hysterical babble, its curse, its writing on the wall. How many masterpieces can be written this way? One at most, one masterpiece for a generation.75
This quote is from the collection of essays Instead of the Novel (Zamiast powieści), published in 1971. The book Burek is talking about is Stanisław Czycz’s short novel And, published for the first time in 1963.76 Burek had presented his ideas on And for the first time in 1965, during a discussion about recent developments in Polish prose.77 Although Burek deliberately breaks the framework of generic rules and patterns, it is quite obviously the novel that remains the most important point of reference for him.
The focus on the novel is more obvious in an article by Burek on the fin de siècle writer, critic and philosopher Stanislaw Brzozowski, entitled Arcydzieło niedokończone78 (The Unfinished Masterpiece, 1966). Referring to Brzozowski’s novels, which he reads as anticipations of a yet unwritten masterpiece, Burek develops his own theory of the masterpiece:
In the bosom of humanity, understood as a great whole, embracing with its generic life all individual existences, the achievements and creative deeds of individuals are never irretrievably lost, never forgotten; on the contrary, they grow into the common body, expand it, persist in it, and are indestructible.79
For Burek, the novel becomes a medium of mediation that makes the individual “achievements” useful to the community. This ideal novel is not about representation, but about giving shape to a will, translating and transmitting an impulse to creation. Burek continues:
With the death of a great creator [i.e., in this case, Brzozowski] some subtle shaping of the will is lost; if, on top of that, he dies prematurely, he takes with him the secret of a number of creations that have not been realized, although he already anticipated them; what remains, however, is the momentum of creation itself, the effort initiated, the call to a hard-working and courageous life.80
Here, Burek turns the unwritten masterpiece, of which, due to Brzozowski’s untimely death, posterity can only conjecture the “creative impulse,” into a social-political program that transcends the sphere of literature; it is essentially a utopian project. In his writings of the 1960s and early 1970s, Burek more or less respects the framework of Marxist ideology, although he mostly contents himself with quoting general terms (“alienation,” “labor,” etc.) that might also work in the context of a not specifically ideologically marked discourse of cultural criticism. The point of reference of this creative impulse is the future—just as György Lukács would have it.81 However, Burek’s concern about the state of contemporary Polish society is also compatible with his later increasingly nationalist and conservative writings. His Brzozowskian calls for “discipline,” “manliness” and “heroic labor” work perfectly in both contexts.
For Polish intellectuals in the 1960s, taking recourse to Brzozowski was a way of adopting a Marxist perspective while avoiding the limitations of official Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.82 Brzozowski had established criticism as a cultural practice of its own right. The critic was no longer limited to mediating between the literary work and the public but helped creating cultural values by giving voice to the self-consciousness of his society that was hidden in the works of the writers (again: the most important works had not been written yet—deciphering them was a quite tricky task, but allowed for a far-reaching freedom of interpretation). In his later writings and especially in those published after 1989, Burek would devote his criticism to the quest for a metaphysical “absolute,” that resides somewhere in the past.83 In his writings of the 1960s, his frame of reference was still “society” and his interest was focused on the future.
6 Conclusion
In interwar Poland, an interesting convergence emerges between sociological research, socio-political concerns, textual practices, such as the memoir and the diary, and their conceptualization in literary theory and criticism. This legacy lived on latently in postwar Poland where it met Marxist ideas on the socio-educational value of literature in general and the novel in particular. While the absence of a binding ideological framework during the period of relative liberalization following the Polish October allowed for the development of theoretical reflections on the importance of the novel for social development, it ultimately proved that literature in post-Hegelian thought was burdened with tasks it could not fulfil. When the “ideal of totality”84 had lost its appeal, criticism and theory retreated to matters of aesthetics. Curiously, the concept of the masterpiece was the point where conservative and Marxist perspectives on man and history could converge in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
As Henryk Markiewicz pointed out, the general tone of criticism concerning the contemporary novel in post-October Poland was negative.85 The discourse of the masterpiece, although highly affirmative, was basically a discourse of crisis.86 This crisis had to do with the challenges of modernity: Poland’s novelists simply had not (yet?) found the adequate literary means to create the perfect novel as an expression and reflection of Polish modern social life—this “truly modern novel” Żółkiewski was searching for so desperately.87 Yet, is it even possible for a novel to be “modern” in style and structure and to deliver an educationally valuable depiction of the modernization of Polish society in all its complexity?88 How can a novel “satisfy the needs of society,” “serve the social cultural education,” “shape a new artistic sensitivity of the masses,” while at the same time meeting the demands of high-modernist poetics, which is precisely what Stefan Żółkiewski demands?89 There is a hidden (and all the more insurmountable) contradiction in the merging of these two different tasks. It reminds one of the insoluble goal conflict of socialist realism—the demand that reality be represented “truthfully” and in “its revolutionary development” at the same time.90 Maybe the “great social and political novel”91 Żółkiewski dreamed of was simply not possible—or not even meant to be possible in the first place. We must keep in mind that the critical discussions of the time also performed a kind of mediating function between the Party’s all-encompassing claim to control on the one hand and the literary public on the other. The more theoretically grounded and aesthetically sophisticated critics such as Żółkiewski (in his later period) and Burek were perhaps primarily interested in creating spaces of possibility, in expanding the scope of literature rather than limiting it through rigid prescriptions.
It is highly interesting, though, that the idea of the novel as a genre that transcends the narrow perspective of individual (auto‑)biography and gives narrative shape to common historical experience and, more so, the quest for an affirmative account of contemporary society that overcomes the limitations of “critical realism” and avoids the “sectarian schematism” of Stalinist literature,92 was something that Marxist and non-Marxist literary criticism of late modernity in Poland shared in common. In the times of socialist realism, the novel had been a mere function of the ideological postulates of Marxism-Leninism. After the upheaval of 1956, it had been liberated from these ideological restrictions, but even for post-1956 literary criticism, the novel still was the place where theory of society, philosophy of history, and prewar intelligentsia ethos should come together. However, given the actual literary production to which criticism had to relate, it was increasingly difficult to maintain these standards. Gradually, the social reference faded into the background; aesthetic categories gained the upper hand, and, what is more important, they lost their connection with social and historical conditions.
One of the many historical ironies of “1968” is that this was the year that officially put an end to Marxist revisionism in Poland—and by this to the connection between social thought and the theory of the novel—, but that it was also the year that saw the first Polish publication of Lukács’s Theory of the Novel. Lukács’s ingenious combination of Hegelian philosophy of history and the theory of literary forms and genres could have inspired unorthodox Marxist debates about the interplay between novel and society. Maria Janion rightly pointed out that for (the young) Lukács the novel was not only a “reflection of the epoch” but also a “response to its most dominating questions” and by this essentially a “project of the future.”93 However, this “utopian” concept of art as a “revolutionary project”94 and the novel as the carrier not merely of sociological knowledge and historical self-consciousness, but of a utopian idea of society was clearly detached from the social reality of late socialism.
The masterpiece finally became what it is in Urbanowski’s understanding: a highly mythologized point of reference for the strivings of a modern (and that is—antimodern) art-as-religion. In the 1970s, Burek still continued Brzozowski’s approach to criticism as a work on society’s self-consciousness and even used Marxist terms and formulas in doing so. However, the gap between society and its novelistic representation as posed in the essays of Julian Kornhauser’s and Adam Zagajewski’s 1974 collection The Unrepresented World (Świat nie przedstawiony),95 could no longer be bridged through the theory of the novel. After 1968, this theory lost its claim to a master theory encompassing history, society, and literature. Soon, it would turn out that Polish society would find other ways to express itself, to gain historical self-consciousness than through the genre of the novel—be it a real or a fantasized, projected one.96
The discourse of the masterpiece seems to be a typical symptom of late modernity. If the novel is no longer in charge of transforming society, then it has at least to incessantly transform itself. The novel has no right to rest, says Burek;97 the ideal masterpiece, the most quintessential novel is always a novel yet to be written. Proust’s Recherche is the best example here in that it is first and foremost a novel about the plan to write a novel, a plan that keeps getting postponed while the project is loaded with ever greater expectations. The other option would have been the essentially antimodern, epic approach that Maria Dąbrowska had highlighted in her foreword to Memoirs of Peasants—the recording of everyday life without any theory and philosophy of history as an affirmation of life and its “deeper, incomprehensible sense.”98
Acknowledgements
This article was written in the framework of the research project “Społem!/Together!: The Interrelation of Literature and the Social Sciences in Poland around 1900 and Its Impact,” funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (project no. 179029).
Adam Mazurkiewicz, Polska literatura socrealistyczna (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego, 2020), 149.
See: Tomasz Burek, “Zapomniana literatura polskiego Października,” in Żadnych marzeń (London: Polonia, 1987), 53–73.
Georg [György] Lukács, “Critical Realism and Socialist Realism,” in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1969), 100.
For a short overview of the implementation of the Soviet doctrine of socialist realism in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, see: Hans Günther, “How Socialist Realism Was Exported to Eastern European Countries and how They Got Rid of It,” in Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin: Institutions, Dynamics, Discourses, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko, Natalia Jonsson-Skradol (London: Anthem Press, 2018), 17–24.
Ibid.
See, e.g., [Edward Abramowski], Jan Skiba: Opowiadanie (Warszawa: M. Krasowska, 1892).
See: Katherine Lebow, “Autobiography as Complaint: Polish Social Memoir between the World Wars,” Laboratorium 6, no. 3 (2014): 13–26.
Stanisław Furmanik, “Literatura pamiętnikarska,” in Rocznik Literacki za rok 1932, ed. Zygmunt Szweykowski (Warszawa: Instytut Literacki, 1933), 215–226.
Ludwik Krzywicki, ed., Pamiętniki chłopów: Serja druga (Warszawa: Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, 1936).
Maria Dąbrowska, as quoted in “Nagrodę ‘Wiadomości Literackich’ uzyskały ‘Pamiętniki chłopów’ uznane przez jury za najwybitniejszą książkę polską 1936 r.,” Wiadomości Literackie XIV, no. 8 (14.2.1937): 1.
See: Galin Tihanov, The Master and the Slave: Lukács, Bakhtin, and the Ideas of Their Time (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 112–128.
Dąbrowska, as quoted in “Nagrodę ‘Wiadomości Literackich’,” 1.
The poet and later Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz recalls how he came across a book by Chałasiński in a hiding place during the first days of the Warsaw Uprising in 1944: “From our host’s bookcase I dug out a volume of sociological essays about prewar Poland, The Young Generation of Peasants, and plunged into a sorry reckoning with my own and my country’s past, from time to time dropping flat on the floor as bullets traced long patterns across the plaster.” Czesław Miłosz, Native Realm: In Search for Self-Definition, trans. Catherine S. Leach (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 249.
Maria Dąbrowska, “[Foreword],” in Pamiętniki chłopów: Serja druga, ed. Ludwik Krzywicki (Warszawa: Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, 1936), xi.
“It would not be enough to call the peasant a layer of the nation,” says Dąbrowska, “for the peasant represents such a vast majority of the nation that only by reading his memoirs the nation fully recognizes, sees and judges itself.” Ibid.
See: Józef Chałasiński, Drogi awansu społecznego robotnika: Studium oparte na autobiografiach robotników (N.P.: Księg. Św. Wojciecha, 1931).
Halina Krahelska, “Przedmowa,” in Zespół Literacki ‘Przedmieście,’ z przedmową Haliny Krahelskiej (Warszawa: Rój, 1934), v–xi. See also: Alina Kowalczykowa, Programy i spory literackie w dwudziestoleciu 1918–1939. 2nd ed. (Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1981), 257.
Józef Chałasiński, Społeczna genealogia inteligencji polskiej (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1946), 12.
Ibid., 33.
Józef Chałasiński, “Socjologia Spencera jako element społecznej samowiedzy inteligencji w Anglii, Polsce i Ameryce w końcu XIX stulecia. (Szkic porównawczy) [1962],” in Kultura i naród: Studia i szkice (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1968), 412.
Chałasiński (Społeczna genealogia inteligencji polskiej, 41–42) quotes from novels by Ignacy Dąbrowski, Włodzimierz Perzyński, and Zofia Nałkowska in order to prove his points on intelligentsia consciousness.
Józef Chałasiński, “Z zagadnień kultury współczesnej,” Przegląd Socjologiczny 11 (1957): 37. He is probably referring to: Ilya Ehrenbourg, “Le chemin du siècle,” in La culture est-elle en péril? Débat sur ses moyens de diffusion: presse, cinéma, radio, télévision, eds. Georges Duhamel et al. (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1955), 104–127. In fact, Ehrenburg spoke of “a certain decline of French literature compared to the previous century” (117, see also 167); he had not literally singled out the genre of the novel, but his key references were novelists (Balzac, Stendhal, 116).
György Lukács [Georg Lukács], The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin, 1971).
Chałasiński, “Z zagadnień kultury współczesnej,” 37.
Ibid., 38.
Ibid.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid.
Ehrenbourg, “Le chemin du siècle,” 117.
Referring to Dąbrowska’s above quoted laudatio for Memoirs of Peasants, one could say that there is something of an ‘epic spirit’ both in Znaniecki’s sociological method and in the novel of socialist realism.
Józef Chałasiński, “Z zagadnień metodologii badan społecznych,” in Z zagadnień kultury kapitalizmu: Studia i szkice (Łódź: Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe, 1953), 23 (first published in Myśl Filozoficzna, no. 1–2 (1951)).
Józef Chałasiński, Młode pokolenie chłopów I, ed. Jan Szczepański (Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1984 [first edition: 1938]), xxxii.
See: Florian Znaniecki, The Method of Sociology (New York: Rinehart & Company, 1934), 194–198; Józef Chałasiński, “Antagonizm polsko-niemiecki w osadzie fabrycznej ‘Kopalnia’ na Górnym Śląsku,” Przegląd Socjologiczny 3 (1935): 149.
Chałasiński, “Z zagadnień metodologii badan społecznych,” 24.
See: Henryk Markiewicz, Polskie teorie powieści: Od początków do schyłku XX wieku (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1998), 185–198.
Michał Głowiński, Tęgie głowy: 58 sylwetek humanistów (Warszawa: Wielka Litera, 2021), 81.
He rejected Zhdanov, but called for a rediscovery of the “great Soviet novel” of the interwar period (“Babel, Pilniak, the young Erenburg,” Kultura i polityka, Warszawa: PIW, 1958, 136).
Żółkiewski, Kultura i polityka, 138.
Ibid.
Ibid., 143.
Ibid., 144.
Katarzyna Chmielewska, “Realizm socjalistyczny w nowym kontekście: Projekt badania historycznoliterackiego,” Studia Litteraria et Historica 8 (2019): 15,
Władysław Gomułka, “O aktualnych problemach ideologicznej pracy partii (Referat na XIII Plenum KC PZPR, wygłoszony dnia 4 lipca 1963 r.),” Nowe drogi 8 (171) (1963): 28–29.
Stefan Żółkiewski, O kulturze Polski Ludowej (Warszawa: PWN, 1964), 123.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid.
Ibid. (“jakiegoś innego realizmu”).
Żółkiewski quotes sociologists Antonina Kłoskowska and Chałasiński in this context (O kulturze Polski Ludowej, 103, 109).
Ibid., 102.
Stefan Żółkiewski, Zagadnienia stylu: Szkice o kulturze współczesnej (Warszawa: PIW, 1965), 5.
Stefan Żółkiewski, Cetno i licho: Szkice 1938–1980 (Warszawa: Książka i Wiedza, 1983), 483.
Stefan Żółkiewski, “Powieść. Opowiadanie. Reportaż,” in Rocznik Literacki 1961 (Warszawa: PIW, 1962), 78.
Żółkiewski, Cetno i licho, 494. Cf.: “At the beginning and especially at the end of the war, the great realist writers […] were widely read and grew in their artistic significance. There was Tolstoy and Sholokhov, Sigrid Undset and Orzeszkowa, Balzac and Flaubert.” Kazimierz Wyka, Pogranicze powieści (Kraków: M. Kot, 1948), 11.
Żółkiewski, Cetno i licho, 144 (“nigdy w dół”).
Głowiński, Tęgie głowy, 89.
Żółkiewski, Cetno i licho, 161.
Ibid., 157.
Burek’s self-characterisation in a later essay. Tomasz Burek, Dzieło niczyje (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 8.
Maciej Urbanowski, “Apetyt na arcydzieło w polskiej krytyce literackiej po 1945 roku (Kijowski—Burek—Wencel),” in Paralele, korespondencje, dedykacje w literaturze polskie XX i XXI wieku (Kraków: Arcana, 2020), 122–143.
Ibid., 124–125.
Andrzej Kijowski, Arcydzieło nieznane (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1964).
“Krytyka jest więc teorią arcydzieła, w odróżnieniu od teorii literatury, która dotyczy w ogóle sposobów wypowiedzi literackich czy też sposobu ich interpretacji.” Andrzej Kijowski, Notes z lat 1955–1985, eds. K. Kijowska and A.T. Kijowski (N.P.: n.p., n.d.), 760,
Urbanowski, “Apetyt na arcydzieło,” 132 (with reference to Burek).
Ibid., 127. Urbanowski (132) also calls it a “myth” and an “ideal.”
Kijowski, Arcydzieło nieznane, 152–153. Boredom is a constant motif in contemporary criticism about the novel, see also Żółkiewski, “Powieść. Opowiadanie. Reportaż,” 69.
Kijowski, Arcydzieło nieznane, 151, “Zamawiam powieść.”
Andrzej Kijowski, “Powieść. Opowiadanie,” in Rocznik Literacki 1956, eds. Zofia Szmydtowa et al. (Warszawa: PIW, 1957), 79.
Ibid., 75.
Ibid., 85.
Andrzej Kijowski, “Powieść. Opowiadanie,” in Rocznik Literacki 1957, eds. Zofia Szmydtowa et al. (Warszawa: PIW, 1958), 67.
Kijowski, “Powieść. Opowiadanie,” [RL 1957], 74.
Ibid., 87.
Urbanowski “Apetyt na arcydzieło,” 134.
Tomasz Burek, Zamiast powieści (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1971), 64.
Ibid., 238.
Stanisław Czycz, And (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1967). First publication in Twórczość, no. 3 (1963).
See: Polska bibliografia literacka za rok 1965, ed. Janina Formanowicz (Warszawa: PIW, 1968), 28.
Twórczość, no. 6 (1966): 73–96.
Burek, “Arcydzieło niedokończone,” 96.
Ibid.
Lukács, “Critical Realism and Socialist Realism,” 95–96.
In Instead of the Novel, Burek completely unironically called Marx “our great educator” (“nasz wielki wychowawca”). Zamiast powieści, 314.
See his collections of essays Dzieło niczyje and Dziennik kwarantanny (Kraków: Arcana, 2001).
See: Lukács, “Critical Realism and Socialist Realism,” 100.
Markiewicz, Polskie teorie powieści, 178.
See: Andrzej Kijowski, Szósta dekada (Warszawa: PIW, 1972), 67; Kijowski, Arcydzieło nieznane, 152.
Żółkiewski, “Powieść. Opowiadanie. Reportaż,” 64 (“prawdziwie nowoczesna powieść”).
See: Ibid., 70–71.
Ibid., 70.
“Statute of the Union Soviet Writers”/“Ustav Soiuza sovetskikh pisatelei SSSR,” in Pervyi vsesoiuznyi siieezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet, eds. Ivan K. Luppol et al. (Moscow: Khud. literatura, 1934), 716.
Żółkiewski, “Powieść. Opowiadanie. Reportaż,” 71 (“wielk[a] powieść społeczn[a] i polityczn[a]”). The term ‘wielkość’/‘greatness’ (71, 72) is of course another variety of the ‘masterpiece’ with its purported totality.
György Lukács, “Realizm krytyczny w społeczeństwie socjalistycznym,” Studia Filozoficzne, no. 3 (1957): 78.
Maria Janion, Romantyzm, rewolucja, marksizm: Colloquia Gdańskie (Gdańsk: Wydawnictwo Morskie, 1972), 206.
Ibid., 208.
Adam Zagajewski, “Katarakta,” in Świat nie przedstawiony, Julian Kornhauser and Adam Zagajewski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1974), 10–13.
See: Zygmunt Bauman, “Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change,” East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures 1, no. 2 (1987): 184.
See: Burek, Zamiast powieści, 57.
Dąbrowska, [Foreword], xvi.
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