The paper analyzes the activities of two socially committed artists: Banksy and Jan Klata, who both use the funfair motif. Banksy employs it in a literal though subversive way in his project Dismaland, which is a quizzical reversal of Disneyland. Klata employs it in his performances (which often take the form of the director’s comments on the reality that surrounds us), showing a set of “amusements” resembling those from a funfair and leading the viewer to a perceptive dissonance (similarly to the collection of Eisenstein’s amusements). It seems that the space created by the committed art that uses the concept of a funfair allows for the implementation of a real rebellion against the status quo. Actual amusement parks, however, create only an illusion of the possibility to break with the norms of the social system.

The article presents Mieczysław Szczuka, a visual artist, graphic designer and architect from Warsaw. His activities at the turn of the 20th century greatly contributed to the emergence of New Arts: he was a pioneer of constructivism in Poland, he created the first Polish photomontages, he argued in favour of giving the arts back to the proletariat. His radical, extremely leftist views made him a loner in his hard struggle for a revolution in the arts (and, in the long run, also in the society).

Red Square is a symbolic place for the Moscow dissidence protests. Russian artists, writers and dissidents have frequently used the history of the square’s memory as a crucial and fundamental issue within the framework of their strategy. Haunting images associated with Red Square’s past, permanently returning in the history of the Russian activism, always refer both to universal narratives of the politics of protest and to the specific contexts producing entirely new meanings. Each time, through their public actions artists create new meanings for the Red Square’s space – they expose the existing limits of the power apparatus and call for the right to legitimize it, therefore contesting the links between the theatre of legitimacy and the public space. From this perspective, the space of protest becomes a fundamental instrument of political action, and the square - ordinarily used in the established order to manifest the government’s symbolic authority - this time becomes a kind of technique as well as a material body support in the politics of resistance.

My paper is a proposal for a non-standard reading of Mother by Maxim Gorky, often perceived as a piece of propaganda with low artistic value, a novel overfilling with ideology, subjugated to the doctrine of social realism. I would like to step beyond these stereotypes and show some contexts that have hardly been identified in the Polish reception of Russian literature from the early 20th century. I distinguish three main issues in the content of the novel: the image of the mother (novel about a mother), socialism as the “new religion” and the utopia of the “new man”. I see the current of Marxism called God-Building as a very important ideological context. I refer to research by Polish and Russian literary scholars and to my own findings.

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of political revue, which in the 1920s became a form of political propaganda in Germany. Erwin Piscator’s revue RRR described here is a good example of its agitprop success. Piscator used the revue (which had been associated with bourgeois entertainment until then) for revolutionary goals, appreciating its form primarily for its huge staging potential. The open form of the revue enabled him to combine different genres and contrasting threads, and exploited the new technologies of the time, including the new media (film, photography, radio). Another interesting point is that for Piscator the revue was the future of modern theatre – not only agitprop theatre, but theatre in general.

In this article, I analyse reactions of writers belonging to the “Young Ukraine” to the Euromaidan. In the first part, I define the specific character of the “Young Ukraine”. In the next part, I present the volume Nebesna Sotnya/ Heaven’s Hundred Heroes as a form of resistance against the authorities. In the third part, I focus on the writings of Andriy Lyubka in the context of the pro-EU revolution. Finally, I describe the literary reaction to the end of the Euromaidan (focussing mainly on the writings of Lyubka).

Lech Piwowar was connected, inter alia, with the Cracow Writers’ Association (1929–1930), with the literary and artistic societies “Litart” (1931–1935) and “Volta” (1935–1937), since 1933 he closely cooperated with the Visual Artists’ Theatre “Cricot” and published in the magazines “Naprzód”, “Gazeta Artystów” and “Tygodnik Artystów”. According to Heronim Michalski, Piwowar was a “keen student” of Tadeusz Peiper, according to Julian Przyboś – he was a “faithful and fanatical” student. The author of this article devoted to Piwowar focuses on his poems employing explosive imagery, motifs of fire and blood, primarily within the current of social, “committed poetics” (e.g. Spring, Build!, or A Beauty’s Funeral recalling the revolutionary Cracow of 23 March 1936), poems with a rhetorical exclamation – a call. They lead to questions about the avant-garde imagination annexing (making more substantive) the proletarian gesture of dissent, an expression of revolt.

The article To live to see namelessness. Broniewski chorally or for part-singing is devoted to the project by the Gallery Raster entitled Broniewski. The event took place in Warsaw in November and December 2005. The organizers of the exhibition succeeded in persuading artists connected with independent art and stage to participate in the project. Although the project of the Gallery Raster is entitled and described using the name of only one poet, the event had a communal character. According to the author of the article To live to see namelessness…, this character is one of the main determinants of Władysław Broniewski as a person and of the phenomenon of his poetry.

Translation of Ananda Devi's text The essential language.

Translation of Ananda Devi's text Percale.

Ananda Devi is a francophone-Mauritian writer who lives (and creates) near Geneva. She is the author of numerous novels, short stories and volumes of poetry. Although the stories of her characters are fictitious, Devi’s texts are strongly inspired by her native island, its history and its ethnic, cultural and linguistic heterogeneity. In her novels, Devi employs numerous stylistic devices to empower individuals who are regarded as worse, excluded from the society due to their deficits.

Ananda Devi, an accomplished modern writer from Mauritius, creates texts that are difficult to classify according to their style and genre. The author is reluctant to accept the treatment of her writings as feminist, particularly Western European feminist, they are surely closer to postcolonial feminism and eco-feminism. Nevertheless, the status of women, their rights and tolerance for otherness are the key elements of Devi’s artistic expression. Her characters rebel against the patriarchal society, they endeavour to discover their own place and identity, which frequently means regaining control over their bodies in the first stage of the transformation. Devi’s female characters live close to nature, where they find comfort, some of them go through a regress to the world of animals and plants.

The article endeavours to characterize key issues raised by Ananda Devi (1957), a francophone writer and poet born in Mauritius who has been living in France for many years. The analysis is based primarily on two novels that were translated into Polish by Krzysztof Jarosz: Le sari vert / Zielone sari and Ève de ses décombres / Ewa ze swych zgliszcz. Already these two novels enable us to perceive the uniqueness of Devi’s writings, whose clear commitment to the discussion about burning social problems equals its commitment to the discussion with literature: its tradition, present status quo, planned future. Devi poses questions about national, linguistic, cultural, and sexual identity; about wasted opportunities of emancipation from the shackles of colonialism; about possibilities of freedom in the environment of systemic subjugation. The micro perspective enables her to show some macro phenomena: continuous production of “dispensable people,” human robots exploited to produce goods for the rich North and the rich West, sacked overnight when using cheap labour force stops bringing profit; systemic racism used by the law-observing state to perform illegal acts. In the world based on the economy of profit, literature, and particularly poetry, becomes a unique weapon, because it serves no purpose. Reading and writing are revolutionary activities, looking for brothers and sisters in poetry is a chance to build a radical International that includes also (or rather, first of all) men and women who have experienced rupture, life in two different dimensions, languages, groups (choosing French by a Mauritian was a declaration, Devi describes the experience of splitting when portraying Sad in Ève de ses décombres). Devi is particularly concerned with the fate of children doomed to failure due to their “bad” descent, skin colour, or sex, children who are guilty from birth. Systemic inequalities and inherited violence in humiliated and ashamed communities mainly afflict women, who are reduced to bodies that may be conquered, beaten, exploited as labour force. Devi succeeds in presenting silent or nameless women not as victims (although she does not underplay their suffering, on the contrary), but as heroes who become reborn after traumas or in next generations, able to take revenge, risking the scraps of stability and false safety to show their presence, to exert influence, to reverberate. The flame of wrath experienced by Devi’s characters, also those burnt alive, as the character in Le sari vert, should (and will) be a seedbed of change, because you cannot burn all women pregnant with silence. Devi accuses (like the author of Les Misérables), she is not afraid of elevation, as panache is necessary for a coup, for changing the status quo, the order based on lawlessness, for social, common awakening.

The interview was conducted in English and translated into Polish by Alina Mitek-Dziemba and Katarzyna Szopa.

Dedication speeches serve to exemplify a broader problem of classifying oratory according to rhetorical modes and circumstances. A review of selected lectures on rhetoric from the 17th and 18th centuries (printed and in manuscripts) as to their treatment of dedication theory enables me to show both the practical constraints of perceiving dedications through the lens of the conventions governing printed dedications in books, and the connection of this form with the broader category of dedication speeches delivered when handing over a gift, a post, or even a bride during wedding ceremonies. The examples from the Polish oratory practice show the functioning of dedication speeches in the oral realm (when handing over an encomium during a wedding or a funeral). Moreover, in accordance with the politeness rule common in the Polish oratory, the relevant dialogues include both offering and thanking, and oratory also comes into play when thanking for a dedication.