The article discusses issues concerning the functioning of Kiejdany in the 17th century as represented in Piotr Kochlewski’s writings and his replies to the letters of the city’s mayor – Józef Zygmuntowicz. Kochlewski, who was a deputy in the private city of Krzysztof Radziwiłł, reported to his master on building of the Protestant community and a school, among others. He also responded to the allegations made by Zygmuntowicz, disagreeing with his position on such matters as land measurement, punishing townspeople and enforcement of Radziwiłł’s recommendations. He accused the mayor of ill-treatment of the citizens and manipulating public opinion; he also criticized the mayor’s self-serving attitude during a plague. The position in these disputable matters was also taken by Prince Krzysztof, who in a letter addressed to mayors of Kiejdany supported his governor.

A diary and a few letters and poems have been preserved from the time when Michał Leon Obuchowicz (circa 1630–1669) was in Moscow slavery (1660–1662). These various texts, which illuminate one another, express the difficult experience in ways characteristic of their genres. The diary was published twice (1859 and 2003) and the contemporary edition was enriched with official and private correspondence. The basis of the last edition of the diary is an eighteenth-century copy of Obuchowiczes’ silva rerum book (MS BK 358). The book contains also unpublished poems related to slavery, which can be attributed to Obuchowicz. The most interesting of them is Lament więźnia (see Annex). It is, similarly to Zbigniew Morsztyn’s Duma niewolnicza, an example of autobiographical lyric created by a soldier. Genologically, it forms a variation of the lamentation on Fortuna‘s instability.

The Khotyn victory in 1673 became an inspiration for many poets. It inspired such well-known artists as Wacław Potocki and Zbigniew Morsztyn, as well as secondary artists like Daniel Kałaj, Mateusz Kuligowski and Samuel Leszczyński. From among many creative writings about the battle of Khotyn there is one that outstands due to its length and detailed presentation. It is a work of future Lithuanian referendary Stefan Jan Ślizień: Haracz krwią turecką Turkom wypłacony first published in Vilnius in 1674. In the introductory poem Do czytelnika łaskawego, the poet adopts the attitude of the real events‘ relator who makes descriptions from the eyewitness’ perspective. Thus, he puts the poem into the circle of poetics of the native heroicum.
Ślizień – who participated in the Khotyn battle – describes battle events in a meticulous way, bringing the recipient closer to the realities. On the pages of the poem, the poet expressively represented the figure of the commander-in-chief – hetman Jan Sobieski, whom he characterized according to the epic principle fortitudo et sapientia.  In addition, as a soldier from Lithuania, albeit fighting along with the Crown troops, he did not forget about the merits of Lithuania on the battlefield: he praises the equipment and courage of the Lithuanian army and appreciates the attitude of the great Lithuanian hetmans, Michał Pac and Michał Radziwiłł, thus showing attachment to the native land. 

At the end of Saxon times and in the king Stanisław period, the Benedictine monastery in Vilnius was a community of people who used various types of prints; in accordance with the patterns of behavior and communication habits characteristic of the feminine contemplative community. The merits of Wołłowiczówna were twofold: she initialized the creation of the texts and she resumed and subsidized prints, which were published for the use of the monastery and to meet the religious needs of the society. The created texts were mainly works in the field of theology of spirituality, which certified the role of the written word in the monastery, and normative as well as formative works, which were used in the internal circulation of the monastery (and in other monasteries of various rules). The translated and native ascetical literature and brackish texts, however, were made available not only to the Benedictines, but also to the public. Also,
occasional prints were published: those created and maintained the monastery’s bonds with the clergy and the local society and, at the same time,  documented important events in the life of the community.

The article introduces the circumstances surrounding the beginnings and ends of marriages of Elżbieta Branicka coat of arms Korczak (1732/33–1800) with two
members of the Sapieha family – Jan Józef Kalasanty, the voivode of Smolensk, and Jan, the voivode of Mścisław. The work includes a discussion and elaboration of scarce pieces of information concerning the time of her birth and the period preceding her first marriage. It also presents an analysis of the original assignment of Teatrum myśli… (1780) by Wenanty Tyszkowski, which focuses on a lady‘s glorious portrait in her maiden age. The main part of the article is opened by the presentation of the state of knowledge about the castellan’s daughter marriages. It is followed by a critical reading of unknown or superficially exploited sources revealing the backstage of these relationships: press reports on wedding ceremonies and the death of her second husband, the Latin decree of the church court in the case of annulment of the first marriage, a draft of an insurance script, in which the bride’s parents determined the amount and conditions for paying her dowry, fragments of Marcin Matuszewicz’s memories and letters from spouses addressed to Jan Klemens Branicki, Grand Crown Hetman. The context for new findings are conclusions and suggestions of researchers of the 18th century magnates of Poland and Lithuania.

The dissertation presents a preliminary analysis of Pawel Ksawery Brzostowski’s Rozmyślanie na wsi w Turgielach – a work that has so far escaped the attention of researchers. It attempts to demonstrate that the meditation, rooted in the rhetorical tradition, bears at the same time certain features of the essay, constituting an interesting example of the author’s implementation of a new literary genre, which gained more and more popularity at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Brzostowski left a rich, albeit not very original literary output. He used various forms of artistic expression. Rozmyślanie na wsi w Turgielach completes his previous achievements. Undertaking of a new challenge indicates the attitude of openness on the part of the writer, the readiness to experiment in the field of form and the willingness to broaden the limits of speech. It is also important for better understanding of the history of the essay in relation to Polish literature.

The author of the article compares the writer‘s poetic and horticultural activity. She is interested in Vilnius heritage (especially that connected with Stanisław Bonifacy Jundziłł), which shaped the natural sensitivity of the poet, and the famed home garden at Oak Park (the suburbs of Chicago), or, as Ryszard Sawicki suggested, Karpowicz’s “American Wilno”. The author of the text asks about the discord between the consciously worked-out lack of sensuality of the poet‘s poems and the sensual richness of the gardener who describes his attitude to nature in interviews and letters. She also propounds the thesis that Karpowicz’s poetry can be interpreted as a conceptual escape from the garden and sensuality, from the imposing and never overstretched nature of nature, and from this perspective it may be viewed also as yet another form of Karpowicz’s “creative negation”. Karpowicz-creator breaks with referentiality embedded in a concrete, sensual experience; he shifts attention from what is found to what is potential. He does not seem to think back to the “place on Earth”; he rather actively creates its own “place in existence”. He creates it − like his “American Vilnius” – from scratch.

The subject of the essay is Romuald Mieczkowski’s picture of Vilnius emerging from poems and short stories that reveal the value of key themes. They are topoi and at the same time they refer to biographical facts. The poet-chronicler exposes the “cordial” memory of trees, houses and stones. It is his way to emphasize “thinking with the heart”, attachment to the place and a loving attitude toward nature. He draws attention to the Vilnius mentality, inherited from the ancestors raised in the tradition of Vilnius, which was the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In the volume Objazdowe kino… Mieczkowski creates his Home-world, he talks about the progressive devastation of the family home and the mythical City, which appears due to his allusions. Vilnius appears here as if emerging from the chronicle of events and it is seen from the perspective of an ordinary inhabitant. Relations with Lithuanian neighbors are good, it is the authorities that treat Poles foully. The editor of the “Znad Wilii” magazine and the curator of Polish culture fights for their “homeland” by deed and word, while the poet perpetuates the myth of the city and mourns the “cemeteries” of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 

The novel Silva rerum has become a bestseller in Lithuania, although it seems that – as a work contesting the Lithuanian national myth – it did not stand a chance to gain such popularity. It was issued for the first time in 2008 and several re-editions have been released so far. The story of the noble family of Narwojsz, presented in Silva rerum covering the years 1659–1667, turned out to be extremely attractive not only for the Lithuanian reader. The novel has become a bestseller also in Latvia and Estonia. In Poland, it did not get such a large publicity, however – perfectly translated into Polish by Izabela Korybut-Daszkiewicz and published in 2015 – it gained great attention of readers and critics. The author of the article wonders what features decided about the reading success of Silva rerum. She analyzes the baroque stylization of the novel, in which, on many levels, the excess meets with asceticism. She looks at the phenomenon of micro-history, which consequently pushes the “great history” to the background (which is unprecedented in the tradition of the Lithuanian historical novel). She shows how Kristina Sabaliauskaitė transforms the authentic space of Vilnius, capturing the specific genius loci of this city and masterfully combining fiction with geographical and historical reality. 

A Conversation with Adam Kaczanowski, Polish contemporary poet.

Literary texts by Adam Kaczanowski, Polish contemporary poet.

Literary texts by Adam Kaczanowski, Polish contemporary poet.

Critical edition of 'De Bicinensi Proelio'.

The work is a discussion of the book It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle by Mark Wolynn, an American psychologist who deals with the therapy of inherited trauma. The author presents Wolynn’s basic assumptions regarding trauma and post-trauma and its therapeutic system and she emphasizes the popularizing aspect of the work. Afterwards, she indicates the possibilities and directions of interpretation given by Wolynn’s theory in the context of contemporary Polish prose that regards war traumas and is written by the so-called second generation.

The article is a discussion of the work of Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik: Zmysł formy. Sytuacje, przypadki, interpretacje polskiej poezji XX wieku. The author combines many research perspectives, which results in many revealing insights regarding Polish poetry of the 20th century. They are derived from a careful analysis of poetic statements placed in a wide field of historical, social and metaphysical problems. The author of the review pays particular attention to Joanna Grądziel-Wójcik’s style and to her sensitivity to semantic and figural strategies, whose interpretation leads to surprising historical and literary conclusions.

The article is a discussion of the book by Wojciech Śmieja entitled: Hegemonia i trauma. Literatura wobec dominujących fikcji męskości. The author of the article concentrates on highlighting the importance of the Silesian scholar’s publication for Polish studies on masculinity. He describes the historical and theoretical literary framework of the presented work, paying attention to the rich exemplification of the analyzed issues. He also undertakes a discussion with some theoretical assumptions of the book, especially in the context of the implications of Kaja Silverman’s model and draws attention to some of the interpretation problems associated with the use of this theoretical approach. The author, thus, proposes an outline of alternative ways of reading the texts of Jacek Podsiadło and Szczepan Twardoch, pointing to the possibility of shifting the focus from Silverman’s approach of masochism to the issue of specifically
understood individuation as the possibility of a different interpretation of the male position – an interpretation which contests the patriarchal social order.

The text discusses the most important theses of Aleksander Wójtowicz’s study devoted to the circles of New Art and it subjects them to critical reading. The author focuses primarily on confrontation of various narrative lines, which we encounter outside the mainstream research on the interwar avant-garde. What seems especially interesting is how Wójtowicz captures the history of the literary experiment as a space of oppression and exclusion, and above all, the struggle for discursive domination, in which gradually New Art was superseded by the avant-garde.

The article is a critical discussion of Tomasz Kukołowicz’s book Raperzy kontra filomaci, which is an important voice in the discussion on rap. The publication was devoted to the connections between the creative imagination of contemporary Polish rappers and the artistic activity of Vilnius philomaths. The author in her review focuses mainly on the part devoted to the subculture, the elaboration of which raises the greatest doubts. 

The aim of this article is to analyze polemics published in the interwar period in “Wiadomości Literackie” magazine and initialized by the debut of Maria Kuncewiczowa. This polemics gave rise to discussion on the style of female writing in general. Criticism focused on the language spoken by writers trying to tell their own private or even intimate stories ruled out from the dominant narrative created by the male authors.

The text attempts to resolve the narrative impasse perpetuating in analyses and reconstructions of the local humanities position in the field of local and supra-local competition. The basic proposal that can lead to the most sensible and credible debate in this matter is the preliminary establishment of the local representatives of (broadly understood) humanities beyond the standard narratives (progress, backwardness, worldliness etc.) and fantasies abundantly present in this discourse. This suggestion may be strongly uncomfortable for the actors acting in this field, but it seems that without undertaking such a confrontation these analyzes and debates will remain sterile, regardless of how instrumentally effective they may be in clashes between individual fractions within the local field of humanities.

A Laudatory Speech on the Occasion of the Renewal of the Doctor of Philosophy Degree of Professor Jan Malicki.

A Report from Conference 'Park: Space and Metaphor' (June 2017).

The article discusses three elements characteristic of the works of the poet, prose writer and performer Adam Kaczanowski, which resulted in the poor visibility of his achievements in the critical literary discourse after 2000. The first issue concerns the convention of “onirism, which stands firmly on earth” (or “wide realism”), which did not allow Kaczanowski to enter into the binary system “experience versus language” visible in the most important critical literary approaches of the last dozen or so years. The second issue is Kaczanowski’s critique of late capitalism ideology – the hero of this article touched upon this problem at a time when the economic situation favored primarily post-transformation, liberal and libertarian narrations. The third thread is related to the strategy of contesting the status quo: whereas from the late 1990s in the poetry and accompanying discourses the most popular category was irony, Kaczanowski used humor as a tool of subversion (both irony and humor are defined after Gilles Deleuze).