https://doi.org/10.31261/SSP.2025.26.03
This article focuses on Five Poems from a Notebook by Aleksander Wat, published in issue 2 of the weekly Nowiny Literackie in 1948. Wat’s texts, written in the Soviet Union and Poland between 1941 and 1947, illustrate the slow revival of his poetic output after a long period of silence. The author of this essay proposes reading these five poems together as a cycle, even though later book publications loosen the connections between them. The analysis focuses on the image of a dry tree, which recurs in the texts while also being transformed. The article outlines new interpretations suggested by the proximity of the poems, particularly regarding the poet’s reflection on religion, the Holocaust, and his own complex identity. The article also highlights the significant role of Paul Éluard, who inspired the last of the five poems and to whom Wat dedicated it. In this context, the article discusses the French poet’s visit to Poland in 1947, his poem from that period about the Warsaw Ghetto, and the shifting approach to Surrealism in the works of Wat and Éluard, as well as in Polish literary criticism of that time.
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2025
Published: 2021-01-13
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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