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1

Frenezja sadyczna po czesku: Křesadlo, Zykmund, Urban

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Pająk P.

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nr 1

EN

In Czech literature of the second half of 20th century a sadistic frenzy is present in several few novels by Jan Křesadlo, Václav Zygmunt and Miloš Urban. Although Czech writers do not copy the work of Marquise de Sade, they do use the motif of sadism to diagnosis the human condition in modern times, just as he did. In his novels Gravelarks and The Lord of Castle Křesadlo comes back to the times of Czechoslovakian Stalinism. In the novel Graduates’ Jubilee Zykmund criticizes the middle-class mentality, while Urban, in his novel Michaela, depicts a world between fiction and reality. Czech authors present the sadistic frenzy as a synthesis of exclusivity and primitiveness. In this way they express the more general subject, that is the relationship between culture and nature in modern times. A more or less perceptible deformation of nature is a side-effect of human aspirations to rule over nature. The sadistic frenzy shows a extreme variant of this phenomenon.

2

Literackie ogrody Karla Hynka Máchy na tle ogrodowej koncepcji kultury czeskiej w dobie odrodzenia narodowego

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Pająk P.

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nr 1(4)

97-117

EN

In the period of national revival Czechs popularize the garden conception of native culture in two variants: noble and middle-class. Representatives of the Czech patriotic nobility build in their estates sentimental parks in English style. These parks are the live monuments of great mediaeval tradition of the Czech Kingdom which is considered by noblemen to be the core of their identity. Patriotic middle-class men do not build gardens, they only use the garden metaphors to describe the peculiarity of Czech culture, especially literature. They want the culture to resemble the Biedermeier garden which joins aesthetical and pragmatic values. In both conceptions the national culture is idealized and its main task is to promote patriotism. The picture of a garden, created by Karel Hynek Mácha in several of his prose works, differs from the noble as well as the middle-class pattern of national Arcadia. Mácha passes for the only consistent Czech romantic writer and he demythologizes the revival gardens in a romantic way. In his interpretation nature is a variable, unforeseeable as well as internally conflicting phenomenon. It attracts as a source of life and freedom, but at a time it equally strongly repels because it puts to death and captivates. Human nature is the best example of this ambiguity which excludes the basis of the garden conception of culture that is the possibility of achieving the harmony between human beings as well as between human being and the nature. Therefore Mácha ironically contests the myth of garden, opposing it to the truth of nature. He transfers the attention from the garden, as the man’s seemingly perfect work, to the man, as the imperfect component of his own work.

3

Violence and Sex and Violence Again: The Sexual Revolution in the Films of the Yugoslav Black Wave

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Pająk P.

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tom 22

PL

Rewolucja seksualna, traktowana jako jeden z głównych wyróżników rewolucji ’68, zostawiła wyraźny ślad w czterech serbskich filmach należących do jugosłowiańskiej czarnej fali. Młode lata (Rani radovi, 1969) Želimira Žilnika, Plastikowy Jezus (Plastični Isus, 1971) Lazara Stojanovcia, WR – tajemnice organizmu (WR – misterije organizma, 1971) Dušana Makavejeva oraz Młody i zdrowy jak róża (Mlad i zdrav kao ruža, 1971) Jovana Jovanovicia podejmują kluczowy dla przebiegu tej rewolucji problem relacji między przemocą a seksualnością. Wolność seksualną rewolucjoniści roku 1968 uznawali za podstawowy przejaw wolności indywidualnej, o którą walczyli, stawiając opór przemocy wypływającej z aktualnej polityki i tradycji kulturowej. Reżyserzy wymienionych filmów ironicznie obrazują, jak realizacja rewolucyjnego postulatu, by seks zastąpił przemoc w roli siły kształtującej życie społeczne, prowadzi do efektu paradoksalnego – do ujawnienia się organicznego, zakorzenionego w ludzkiej naturze, uwikłania seksualności w przemoc.

EN

The sexual revolution, regarded as one of the main hallmarks of the 1968 revolution, left a distinct mark in four Serbian films of the Yugoslav Black Wave: Early Works (Rani radovi, 1969) by Želimir Žilnik, Plastic Jesus (Plastični Isus, 1971) by Lazar Stojanović, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (WR – misterije organizma, 1971) by Dušan Makavejev and Young and Healthy As a Rose (Mlad i zdrav kao ruža, 1971) by Jovan Jovanović. These films tackle the issue of the relationship between violence and sexuality, which was crucial for the course of the revolution. Sexual freedom was recognised by the revolutionaries of 1968 as a fundamental manifestation of the individual freedom for which they fought, resisting the violence resulting from the current political and cultural tradition. The directors of these films ironically illustrate how the implementation of the revolutionary demand that sex replace violence as a force shaping social life leads to a paradoxical effect: the revelation of sexuality’s organic entanglement in violence, rooted in human nature.

4

Rękopis z zaświatów. „Hrad smrti” Jakuba Demla

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Pająk P.

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nr 4

EN

In the story The Castle of Death(1912) Jakub Deml presents an esoteric text, which allows initiation, that is to say the revival and improvement of human spirit, because it points the way to the absolute hidden behind the words. The highest form of initiation is transcendence, which consists in the unity of life and death. To achieve this, the candidate of initiation must die in this world. Deml shows the horror of death by the conventions of a horror story. In The Castle of Death, writing and reading the esoteric text means the confrontation between the life-giving language and the ineffable silence of death. This confrontation leads to the acceptance of silence, because in the world of absolute language as the medium of the spirit loses its raison d’être. To emphasize the uniqueness of esoteric text, Deml uses the form of a found manuscript. He presents the moment of transition between temporality and transcendence as a dream that goes back to a source of human life.

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Ojczyzna i siedziba Drakuli, czyli złe miejsce w Europie

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Pająk P.

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nr 4(7)

239-261

EN

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the most famous example of a successful symbiosis between Gothicism and balkanism. With this symbiosis, Irish author refreshes and popularizes the vampire myth and enriches it with the myth of Transylvania as a homeland of vampirism. Stoker tries to make the image of Transylvania as authentic as possible, but at the same time, he mystifies some facts. He creates Transylvania in accordance with balkanistic stereotype as a beautiful, but backward land. European culture is mingled there with the oriental culture. Count Dracula’s vampirism is a horrible effect of this cultural hybridization. According to psychoanalytic interpretation, the castle o fa vampire symbolizes the unconsciousness of Westerners, and the vampire is their double. Dracula embodies their repressed ideas related to the desire of absolute power which enables to satisfy the instincts freely. The balkanistic context of psychoanalytic interpretation of Dracula’s castle allows the extension of this interpretation to the entire Transylvania, which in Stoker’s novel is a metonymy of the Balkans and Eastern Europe. This region of Europe was in the 19th century regarded in the West as the boundary between Europe and Asia, and it serves as a locus horridus, that is to say, a bad place which is a reservoir of culturally forbidden desires that Westerners repress by attributing them to the Eastern European culture.

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Zmierzch bogów w Dubrowniku

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Pająk P.

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nr 5

EN

The Croatian film Occupation in 26 pictures (1978), directed by Lordan Zafranović is considered as one of the most controversial vision of the Second World War in Yugoslav cinema. The director uses the ornamental style, modeled on Italian cinema, to portray the change of power in Dubrovnik in 1941 – at the beginning of the fascist occupation of the city. He juxtaposes the licentiousness of Italian, German and Croatian fascists and the fall of the Dubrovnik aristocracy and the rebellion of communists. The political changes in the city are presented against the background of its rich cultural tradition. Zafranović highlights the beauty of Dubrovnik’s architectural and natural landscape that fascists desecrate. Decadent poetics with its aesthetic excess allows him to refresh and deepen the communist interpretation of the fascist occupation.

7

Uncanny Styria

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Pająk P.

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nr 9(12) cz.1

149-162

EN

The nineteenth century in the West was a period of intellectual and artistic fascination with the East, both distant and near: Asian and Eastern European. One of the regions that attracted the interest of Western Europeans was Styria, situated on the border separating Austria from Hungary and the Balkans, that is, the West from the East. Borderland cultural phenomena stimulate the imagination as much as exotic phenomena. Both disturb with their hybrid character, which results from the mixing of elements from familiar and alien cultures. With their duality and ambiguity, borderlands are the source of the uncanny, which in the Western literature of the nineteenth century became the basic ingredient of the Western image of the Styrian lands. Uncanny Styria was discovered by Basil Hall, a Scottish traveler who reported the impressions of his stay in this region in his 1830s travelogue Schloss Hainfeld; or, a Winter in Lower Styria. In the second half of the century, two Irishmen wrote about the uncanny Styrian borderland: Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker. Both associated Styria with vampirism: the former in the 1870s novella Carmilla, the latter in the 1890s short story Dracula’s Guest. The central thread that runs through all three texts is the decline of Styrian nobility. From Hall, it prompts expression of melancholy regret, accompanied by a sense of strangeness. In his work, the erosion of the culture of the nobility results from Styria’s isolated location in the borderlands, as well as the destructive influences of modernity. Le Fanu balances the regret with horror, related to a different interpretation of decline as cultural regression. In Stoker’s story, the terror intensifies with the sense that the regression that affects the province of Styria could extend to Western Europe.