Ruch Literacki

The problem of freedom features prominently in many great novels, and Don Quixote, as any attentive reader will know, is no exception. Cervantes was deeply concerned with that issue, and, what is also known, he had an abiding interest in Erasmianism, a set of beliefs and attitudes espoused by his tutor Juan López de Hoyos. The Erasmian connect-ion can be traced back not to the writer's biography but also to various points in his work. This article examines Cervantes' handling of the theme of freedom in Don Quixote in such a way that each of the issues can be taken up for further, in-depth analysis. They range from religion and society in Renaissance Spain, the role of women and their pursuit of emancipation, the vogue for transgression of literary norms and conventions, excessive wealth and social inequalities to the Erasmian affirmation of free will. All of these problems are presented here just in outline. Detailed and exhaustive analyses will, hope-fully, follow in the future.

The goal of this article is to show the interdependence of the reception of Don Quixote and the concept of identity. The argument is founded on the rejection of Don Quixote perceived as an invented character from the world of fiction and treating him instead as a Cartesian subject, in possession of the cogito faculty and defined by the truth. The Cartesian project, though, comes under pressure when the cogito constitutes itself by telling a story about itself. Cartesianism, a philosophy of consciousness, contains an embryo of a new reflection about subjectivity. With the new approach comes a positive reappraisal of the figure of Don Quixote and an acknowledgement of the key role of fiction in the process of becoming human. The liberation of identity from the tyranny of substantialism and the foundation of the subject on action has paved the way for treating the goals of action as originals produced by the subject rather than copies or reproductions.

The article opens with a brief history of a genre of literary works that blend both tragic and comic elements, the latter of which seem to have been increasingly more prominent in European culture in general. This article examines various functions of the tragic and comic combination in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, some scenes from Shakespeare’s King Lear, and two modern narrative fictions, where the main character is simultaneously heroic and comic, Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote and Sławomir Mrożek’s short story The Last Hussar.

This article argues that humour is a distinct category, applicable to literature, fine art, and even music, and takes up nineteenth-century art as a case in point.

This study is an exploration of formal-aesthetic correspondences between presenta-tion strategies and techniques of transforming traditional literary and musical genre conventions in Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck. It takes as its bottom line William J. Entwistle’s distinction between re-creation and recreation (he used it in his appreciation of Don Quixote and so did Erich Auerbach) and his under-standing of art as an act of reproduction (re-creation) obliged to please (recreation). Seen from that perspective, both Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Berg’s opera “suffer” from ex-cess – overmuchness and surfeit with a tangible residue of melancholy. But it is because of these surpluses that these two works are regarded as masterpieces with continuing universal appeal.

This article examines the appropriation of the pair Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa by Jacek Kaczmarski and Francesco Guccini, two iconic late twentieth-century songwriters (each had more strings to his bow) who were fascinated by Cervantes’ novel. While, traditionally, Don Quixote is seen as the dominant character and Sancho the subordinate one, in Kaczmarski's and Guccini’s songs Sancho is placed on an equal footing the errant knight. This striking revaluation was in a way conditioned by the medium, the twentieth--century art song with its aspirations to be alive to the concerns of the time. For singers and songwriters committed to the cause of social justice, in tune with the prevailing egalitarian, leftist ways of thinking, it was only natural to deconstruct the master/servant nexus at the heart of Cervantes’ novel. However, as the political systems of their home countries differed widely, the social activism pursued by the Polish and that of the Italian author is hardly comparable. While Guccini’s texts resonate with themes of social justice, Kaczmarski builds more bridges to Cervantes (not least in the sphere of poetry) in his song cycle. Despite all their differences, the work of the Polish bard and of the Italian cantautore demonstrates that the mindset and the social realities of the twentieth century mindset made it impossible to bring back Don Quixote without allowing room to Sancho Pansa.

Józef Szajna – as director and set designer – staged Cervantes’ Don Quixote on three occasions, twice in Poland (i.e. at Teatr Ludowy in Nowa Huta, 1965, and at Teatr Studio in Warszawa, 1976) and once in Spain (Alcalá de Henares, 1993). His creative approach characterized by the blurring of the boundary between the human world and the world of things, or the objectification of human beings and the animation of mere objects, enabled him to lay bare the contradictions at the heart of Cervantes’ novel. In Szajna’s spectacles the circus show and fun fair theatricals interacted with scenes that stirred up memories of war and the Holocaust. Drawing on a broad range of materials including reviews, photos, the text of Lidia Zamkow’s stage adaptation of Cervantes’ novel, the film version of the play Cervantes and Szajna's own statements the article tries to get a grip on the key aspects of his Polish dramatic adaptations of Don Quixote and Cervantes’ biogra-phy and to assess what insights they may contribute to the interpretation of the novel and its central character, the iconic knight-errant.

The article is a reappraisal of the work of Tymoteusz Karpowicz, one of the landmarks of the Polish poetic Neo-avant-garde, in terms of the quixotic model (principle). This approach brings into focus the following building blocks of Karpowicz’s autocreative poetics: the private library project, the idea of the book of books, the concept of holistic interconnectedness and the poet’s programmatic detachment (isolationism). In his verse they form sylleptic configurations in which language-games collide with the existential concrete and, in effect, transform the poetry into a performance acted out by the author both in his text and his highly mythicized geographic space. The superposing of his autothematic statements on his autocreative performative actions shows their remark-able congruence, and hence t the incontestable applicability of the quixotic model to describe the nature of Karpowicz’s creative project. In sum, he was a poet bent on finding his own place between the totalizing power of language and the harsh realities beyond the pale of literature.

This article is divided into two parts. Part I presents the origins and the research objectives of the authorial project Don Kichot Open Gallery/Don Quijote – galeria abierta. Its first product is a book titled identically to the project and published in collaboration with the POSET Foundation. It contains Miguel de Unamuno’s essay ‘El caballero de la triste figura’ (1896), translated into Polish by Carlos Marrodán Casas, and quality repro-ductions of nearly fifty artworks on the theme of Don Quixote (some of them shown for the first time) produced over a period of over 250 years. The album features the work of thirty Polish artists. Part II presents an interpretation of Marian Nowiński's painting ‘Don K[ichot] trwa dalej. W cieniu 2’ (Don K[Quixote] is still going on: In the shadow 2). A closer examination of this picture reveals a wealth of creative references to the Euro-pean and Polish tradition (Andrea Mantegna, Annibale Carracci, Orazio Borgianni and Jacek Malczewski respectively) and an artistic affinity for the cinema of Grigori Kozints-cev, Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam. The fusion of two aesthetics (painting and film) and diverse styles of painting (Renaissance, Baroque, twentieth-century symbolism) is testi-mony to both Nowiński's erudition and the boldness of his artistic ambition.

This article contains an analysis of a short passage about Don Quixote from Michel Serres’ philosophical dialogue entitled La Légende des Anges. He claims that the generally accepted view of the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa as a binary, hierarchical pairing is an illusion. In fact, Cervantes deconstructs the familiar opposi-tions of the carer and his subordinate in need of care, the rational thinker and the dreamer, the main character and his associate. As the two protagonists continually ex-change their roles, theirs is a story of creating and upholding new kind of bond. In describing the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Pansa, Serres alludes to the figure of the parasite (from his 1980 book Le Parasite), i.e. a third party or position, an (invisible) go-between or middle ground that makes the relationship possible but also messes things up. Serres acknowledges the dynamics of this configuration on the formal level and makes it the structural axis of his text, which is just a piece of dialogue between a nurse and an air traffic controller. Their interaction seems to be fully inscribed in the binary model, yet, he insists, there is more to it. This may well be the case with the pair of characters in Cervantes’ novel.