Ruch Literacki

This article examines the autobiographical quotations of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra that are corroborated directly and indirectly by both old and newly discovered documents which contain references to the writer and his relatives. It is worth bearing in mind that some of that evidence was for long ignored, or allowed to fade into oblivion, or, sometimes, misinterpreted. Even some 20th-century scholars acclaimed for their richly documented biographies of the author of Don Quixote, appear not to have taken account of that resource, while insisting that there are still many unsolved enigmas in Cervantes' life. Undoubtedly, his life, like that of any genius, continues to exert an irresistible fascination even though its exploration is fraught with countless hazards, not least because of the complex interrelationships between his own texts and all kinds of documentary evidence supplied by historical research. The latter, the article claims, constitutes not only an invaluable treasure for any pursuit of the truth about Cervantes but also a solid base for a comprehensive account of his life and work.

This article draws on the refined techniques of literary interpretation brought to the Cervantes studies by John J. Allen's Don Quixote: Hero or Fool (1969), but refocuses its attention from the problem of Quixote's character to ‘bizarreness’ – an aesthetic category that can be found at the root of the confused, incongruous perception of reality in the fictions of Cervantes and the contemporary Polish author Olga Tokarczuk. In Chapter 18 of Part Two of Don Quixote Don Lorenzo calls the knight errant ‘ loco bizarro’. The translations of this phrase reveal a striking polyvalence of the Spanish adjective bizarro when compared to bizzarro (in Italian) and bizarre (in both French and English). A close analysis of the following chapter shows that the author contextualizes the preceding events within a narrative perspective marked by empathy and understanding rather than authoritative categorization, i.e. a type of narration discussed by Olga Tokarczuk in her 2019 Nobel Lecture “The Tender Narrator” and identified as ‘bizarreness’ in her Opowiadania bizarne [ Bizarre Stories].

The story of Princess Antonomasia is one of the relatively autonomous tales interpolated into the string of adventures centered round the title character of Don Quixote. The fact that the Princess is named after the rhetorical device of antonomasia ( pronominatio), well known from ancient and early modern textbooks (Cicero, Quintilian, Erasmus, Juan Luis Vives, Cypriano de Soarez), is also one of the many signals alerting the reader to the multilevel significance of names and naming in Cervantes’ fictional world. So, in this case, Antonomasia functions as a regular proper name and, once its figurative potential is factored in, as an alias, hiding or replacing the Princess’s real name.
In Don Quixote Cervantes uses antonomasia, i.e. the trope of calling a person by a descriptive tag different from his or her given name, not only to multiply new, straightforwardly appropriate epithets, but also to open to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, allegory, irony or paradox.

The discussion in this article is based on the assumption that the sociocultural dynamics of quixotism is common to many cultures and, as a consequence, each of them should produce its own version of the emblematic Don Quixote. The formula of this concept of quixotism comes from Magdalena Barbaruk’s studies in the field of theory and cultural practice, in which she probes into vast stretches of history, including the centuries after the publication of Cervantes’ novel as well as the epochs that preceded it. Accordingly, the circle of Quixote-like figures should include Ignatius Loyola, Saint James, Christopher Columbus, the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki and Prince Myshkin from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot. The principal criterion for inclusion in this category is “to be a reader who walked out of the library so as to act in accordance with the books” (Magdalena Bodnaruk, ‘Don Kichote w naukach o kulturze’ [Don Quixote in Cultural Studies], in: Wieczna krucjata. Szkice o Don Kichocie [The Eternal Wandering: Essays on Don Quixote], Poznań 2016, p. 164). Taking that step results, as a matter of necessity, in a clash with the generally accepted rules and conventions. Moreover, while doing so the quixotic individual has to face the risk of having his heroism held up to ridicule or dismissed as folly.
This article puts up some additional candidates to Barbaruk’s short list of ‘Quixotes’ and considers the way in which their distinctive qualities may modify her quixotic formula. The first is the protagonist of the 1955 stage/screen adaptation of Cervantes’ novel by the Soviet Russian author Evgeny Schwartz. His Quixote is a knight errant who knows all too well that he defies people’s routines and expectations and yet remains true to himself and his ideals. He is aware that to ‘save the world’ he has to live and act in the boundary area between the profanum and the sacred, or the real world and a kind of fairyland. Therefore, what marks the timeless Quixote is the deliberate overstepping of a role sanctioned by the ruling consensus, and making a stand against the powers that be. The Middle Ages certainly produced many figures cast in that mould, among them Saint Gerald of Aurillac (whose Vita was written by Odo of Cluny). If a sharp, uncompromising view of reality is a distinct character trait of a quixotic personality, another figure that need to be added to the short list of is Buono, the good alter ego of Viscount Medardo, the protagonist of Italo Calvino’s novel The Cloven Viscount (1952). Finally, the article argues that a character who sets off on a journey (quest) which gives him the opportunity to perform noble (chivalric) deeds represents another version of a Quixotic knight errant. The case in point is Tristran from Neil Gaiman’s fairy tale fantasy Stardust.

This article examines the position of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the intertextual network of Juliusz Słowacki' digressive poems, closely bound up with Schlegel's conception of Romantic irony. The article analyzes in turn direct references to Don Quixote; the use by the Polish poet, often with an ironic twist, of Cervantes' narrative strategies; the influence of Cervantes on the creation of the world of the poems (not least their central characters) and on Słowacki's extensive use of parabasis in all its varieties – from authorial commentaries and addresses to the reader, through characters who step out of their role to speak to the reader, to the foregrounding of the problems involved in the act of reading – to highlight and disrupt the illusion of fictional truth. The analysis shows that the Spanish classic was in many ways Słowacki's literary model and an aesthetic inspiration.

This article looks at the characters and types of narration in Michał Czajkowski's Dziwne życia Polaków i Polek [ Strange Lives of Poles and Polish Women]. Published in 1865, the book is a collection of biographical essays recounting in vivid detail the real-life stories of Polish noblemen from the Ukraine caught in the power games of the Ottoman and the Russian Empire in the early 19th-century. Czajkowski makes no direct references to Cervantes, but at one point calls his bunch knight errants, insisting that Poland produced more of them than any country in the world. Elsewhere he counterpoints earthy realism and (mock)epic decorum, fact and literary invention ('dzieje bajeczne') because they both make up the life of Antoni Iliński vel Iskender Pasha. Inspired by Joachim Lelewel's 1820 comparative study Historyczna paralela Hiszpanii z Polską w wieku XVI, XVII, XVIII [ A Historical Parallel between Spain and Poland in the 16th, 17th, and 18th Century] the article tries to trace such covert links or echoes of Cervantes in Czajkowski's handling of his maverick heroes.

In his article titled ‘Rzut oka na ścieżkę, którą poszedłem’ [A look back at the path I have taken], published in 1832, the twenty-year old Józef Ignacy Kraszewski named a few novelists he thought worth imitating. Among them was the author of Don Quixote, “a man with an intimate knowledge of the human heart, a great investigator, and an exquisite painter”. His masterpiece was “a small collection of essays”, a treasure house of major literary forms for all European writers that came after him. Unexpectedly, however, in the last paragraph of his feuilleton Kraszewski declares he is not interested in following Cervantes because in his writing practice he makes a point of not imitating anybody. “Good or bad”, he concludes, “I am content with myself and with what I write.” I am doing my myself. Yet, if the article is put side by side with some extracts from Don Quixote shows that his demonstrative rejection of literary models does not include the legacy of Cervantes. So, in the end, it is no more than a tongue-in-cheek declaration by a young writer. After all, the novel entitled Pan Walery he is about to write, as it is announced in the article, will be a Cervantes throwback. Its unconventional form (what with interleaved, contrapuntal narrative technique, fragmentary narratives, experiment-ing with hybridity and improvisation) is in fact a literary game with Don Quixote and an ironic appendix to Cervantes' inquiry into the nature of imitatio.

Don Quichotte, an opera by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Henri Cain first performed in 1910, is one of the most suggestive examples of a transposition of a literary theme to musical theatre and of a creative adaptation of a literary source-text into an operatic libretto. This article explores the manner in which the opera creates a musical portrait of the main character and presents an interpretation of the opera’s narrative. The analysis is conducted on two levels, textual (the libretto) and musical (the score). The conclusion, apart from its summarizing function, offers an answer to the question about the attractiveness of the Don Quixote theme for musical adaptations.

This article traces two lines of philosophical interpretations of the character of Don Quixote. Common to both is the view that Don Quixote should be treated as a paragon of directness, i.e. a subject that strives to attain his ideals – a sphere of sense that is general – without any mediation (in the sense of Vermittlung). For the existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who in this respect follows Kierkegaard, the individual cannot constitute himself unless he rejects mediation, Quixote is a knight of faith, whose every intervention is an act of heroism analogous to Abraham's leap of faith. For the Hegelian Constantin Noica the opposite is true: any attempt to move from the particular to the general without mediation is a symptom of an existential and ontological disorder. Taking his cue from Hegel’s Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit ( Phenomenology of Spirit), Noica repudiates Quixote’s unswerving commitment as insane folly. These two diametrically opposed assessments – one inspired by Kirkegaard, the other by Hegel – show the significance of Don Quixote as a focus of the modern debate about mediation and its dilemmas.

In this close reading of the poem ‘Z La Manczy’ ( From La Mancha) by Jan Lechoń, written and published in exile in 1953, its historical and political contexts are examined in the light of the poet’s diaries. Lechoń, it seems, thought much of Charles de Gaulle and gave him, cast as a latter-day Quixote on horseback, a prominent place in the poem. This article explains and analyses the role of each of the historical and fictional characters (Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, Joan d’Arc, the French kings and Napoleon) in the mythical structure of the poem and, last not least, addresses the issue of representing historical processes, politics and politicians in poetry.

The Strange Adventures of Don Quixote Retold by Wiktor Woroszylski is a book that has been consistently mislabelled since its publication in 1983. It is described as an abbreviated version of Don Quixote for young readers, probably because of its publisher Nasza Księgarnia specializes in children's books. In fact, however, Woroszylski's the book plays a sophisticated literary game with the original using a whole bag of postmodernist tricks. Like Foucault, Woroszylski does not believe in Quixote's deathbed renunciation of chivalry and conversion to common sense. Nor does he go with the narrator's account of the knight errant's death. In this and many other instances he blames the original author for ignorance. As a result, he takes over and retells the story from a diametrically opposite point of view. Woroszylski's text is thus a supplement and a corrective of the original. The article examines the techniques used to by him to achieve his goals. It also tries to shed more light on his decision to stand up to Cervantes and to position this novel in Woroszylski's oeuvre. Finally, the article considers the effect the reassessment of this novel would have for the history of contemporary Polish fiction.

This article deals with the expansion of the culture of quixotry in Polish fiction of the 2010s. Although Tomasz Wiśniewski, Natalka Suszczyńska, Dorota Kotas and Wit Szostak, notable representatives of this new trend, on the whole make no reference to Don Quixote, their novels do display certain characteristic features of the quixotic discourse, i.e. the story is centred on a character with an unconventional perception of reality and the primacy of imagination in relations between the individual and society. The imagination that drives these novels moves both upwards, opening to the characters a prospect of vertical ‘Gothic’ ascent, and sideways, helping the characters to explore various ways of life and to adapt in the horizontal real world (cf. Dawid Kujawa, ‘Dzieci skitrane na tyłach katedry’ [Children hidden at the back of the cathedral], “Stoner Polski”, 2022). In the texts of younger writers the vertical vector is often associated with the desire to transcend the condition of depressive precarity and the logic of the capitalist system).

Analyzing Don Quixote from the perspective of the main character's madness has a long history backed by a well-entrenched critical tradition. The latter was recently revisited by Marcin Rychter in his article 'Don Kichote i szaleństwo' [Don Quixote and madness] ( Przegląd Filozoficzny, N.S., 2017 (2), pp. 121–133). Although Rychter eschews psychiatric terminology in his descriptions of Don Quixote's state of mind, he cannot help using the term 'psychosis' and assumes that the reactions of Cervantes' protagonist are delusions and hallucinations. This article steers clear of any psychoanalytical or psychiatric interpretations of Don Quixote and suggests instead that he represents a metaphorical projection of self-estrangement which has reached the point of not being able to interact with the outside world. The very creation of such a character dramatizes the problem of incongruity between self-expression and the rules of communication with other people and the basic assumptions which make understanding and being understood possible. In effect Don Quixote may be seen as an exemplary figure typifying both autism and cognitive distortions. He personifies the Other, i.e. someone who is separate and estranged from the community and its norms and, at the same time, valiantly grapples with that condition trying again and again to transcend it.