The place of Leśmian today (on contemporary literary criticism reception)

Abstract

The paper, being a postscript to the book Miejsca Leśmiana. Topika recepcji krytycznoliterackiej (Leśmian’s places. The topos of critical reception) (2011), outlines the history of literary criticism reception of Bolesław Leśmian’s output from the first years of the 21st century to the jubilee year 2017. Not only did the accelerated reception visible already in the early 1990s continue to gain momentum but it even got stronger in the analyzed period. Critics are bolder and bolder in speaking of Leśmian as a precursor of the 20th century modernism and postmodernism; “(post) modernizations” of Leśmian are accompanied, in turn, by changes on the level of language (even though some of them are rather superficial). Despite the discontinuity highlighted by critics, this “return to Leśmian”, which has lasted for over two decades, is to a large extent a come-back to approaches and threads of earlier reception. There are, however, significant shifts, e.g. in the uses of the topos of Leśmian’s Jewish/Polish identity. Totally new phenomena, in contrast, include politicization of the discourse about the poet.