Różewicz’s identity narratives. The (un)completed project

Abstract

Wojciech Browarny’s book entitled “Tadeusz Różewicz i nowoczesna tożsamość” is an ingenious, reliable and intelligent attempt to interpret Różewicz’s prose as an artistic study, a testimony, or a reflection on the identity of the man the second half of the twentieth century. The author reads short stories, essays, biographical sketches and memoirs, reports, diary fragments, and selected meta-literary texts by the poet as a polyphony bound with the matrix of identity narrative, profiled both to the fate of a contemporary Pole and Różewicz’s own biography. The identity reflection is interpreted here as a record of “self-creation in culture,” synonymous with “individual proposal of understanding of the collective and the shared in the individual experience” as an expression of “interpretation of role models, a description of the relation between the old and new images of human culture, an attempt to merge personal experience with historical memory and traditions present in the modernity”.