Bruno Jasieński was a bilingual Polish-Russian writer who died in exile in Siberia in 1939. This volume traces his literary evolution. The introductory biographical sketch is followed by a discussion of Jasieński's contribution to Polish poetry, specifically the Futurist movement which, like its parallels in Russia and Italy, revolutionized poetic language. An analysis and evaluation of Jasieński's prose work sheds light on the relationship between politics and literature in early twentieth-century Poland and Russia. Most of Jasieński's novels and short stories were written in the approved Soviet tradition of Socialist Realism. His Man Changes His Skin is considered one of the best Soviet industrial novels of the 1930s. The author's comprehensive and skillful treatment of Jasieński's literary production, the first to appear in English, also makes a valuable contribution to the knowledge of Futurism in Eastern Europe and Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union. The volume contains numerous quotations from Polish and Russian literature, both in English translation (prepared by the author) and in the original. It will be of interest to students of Slavic literature, comparative literature, and the literature of ideology.

I Burn Paris has remained one of Poland's most uncomfortable masterstrokes of literature since its initial and controversial serialization by Henri Barbusse in 1928 in L'Humanite (for which Jasienski was deported for disseminating subversive literature). It tells the story of a disgruntled factory worker who, finding himself on the streets, takes the opportunity to poison Paris's water supply. With the deaths piling up, we encounter Chinese communists, rabbis, disillusioned scientists, embittered Russian emigres, French communards and royalists, American millionaires and a host of others as the city sections off into ethnic enclaves and everyone plots their route of escape. At the heart of the cosmopolitan city is a deep-rooted xenophobia and hatred - the one thread that binds all these groups together. As Paris is brought to ruin, Jasienski issues a rallying cry to the downtrodden of the world, mixing strains of "The Internationale" with a broadcast of popular music. With its montage strategies reminiscent of early avant-garde cinema and fist-to-the-gut metaphors, I Burn Paris has lost none of its vitality and vigor. Ruthlessly dissecting various utopian fantasies, Jasienski is out to disorient, and he has a seemingly limitless ability to transform the Parisian landscape into the product of disease-addled minds. An exquisite example of literary Futurism and Catastrophism, the novel presents a filthy, degenerated world where factories and machines have replaced the human and economic relationships have turned just about everyone into a prostitute. Yet rather than cliche and simplistic propaganda, there is an immediacy to the writing, and the modern metropolis is starkly depicted as only superficially cosmopolitan, as hostile and animalistic at its core. This English translation of I Burn Paris fills a major gap in the availability of works from the interwar Polish avant-garde, an artistic phenomenon receiving growing attention of late.

This book is the first critical attempt made in any language to re-examine the entire oeuvre of Bruno Jasieński (1901-1938). It takes into account the writer's lifelong concerns but places them in the context of the universal value of his writing, generated by his modernist passions and his fascination with the grotesque - an artistic device that was consonant with his need to portray life in all its complexities. The author relies on the grotesque as an element that unifies Jasieński's futuristic poetry with his prose. Especially important in this regard is the close reading of Jasieński's satiric grotesques written in the Soviet Union. The author does not avoid the intricacies and difficult questions of Jasieński's ideological commitment but focuses mainly on the consequences that the highly ambivalent and ambiguous nature of the grotesque has on the interpretation of his work.

This play, by Futurist poet Bruno Jasienski, is an outstanding example of the joining of left-wing politics and avant-garde interest in human mechanization that characterized the experimental theatre of Poland in the inter-war years. Stalinism and the purges cut short Jasienski's career and prevented productions of his play for many years - except for a brilliant constructivist staging in Prague in 1933. The Mannequins' Ball can now take its place along with Capek's R.U.R. as one of the major twentieth-century dramas making use of the themes and techniques of human automata. Reproduced in this volume are the eight woodcuts by Moor which accompanied the original Moscow publication in 1931.

The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.

""In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a cafe called Ziemianska."" Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the ""fin de siecle,"" They sat in Cafe Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. ""Caviar and Ashes"" tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically. Marci Shore begins with this generation's coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafes to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature offers an introduction to Polish literature through thirty-three case studies, covering works from the Middle Ages up to the present day. Each chapter draws on a text or body of work, examining its historical context, as well as its international reception and position within world literature. The book presents a dual perspective on Polish literature, combining original readings of key texts with discussions of their two-way connections with other literatures across the globe. With a detailed introduction offering a narrative overview, the book is divided into six sections offering a chronological pathway through the material. Contributors from around the world examine the various cultural exchanges at play, with each chapter including: Definitions of key terms and brief overviews of historical and political events, literary eras, trends, movements, groups, and institutions for those new to the area Analysis and notes on translations, including their hidden dimensions and potential Textual focus on poetics, such as strategies of composition, style, and genre A range of historical, sociological, political, and economic contexts From medieval song through to the contemporary novel, this book offers an interpretive history of Polish literature, while also positioning its significance within world literature. The detailed introductions make it accessible to beginners in the area, while the original analysis and focused case studies will also be of interest to researchers.

The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature offers an introduction to Polish literature through thirty-three case studies, covering works from the Middle Ages up to the present day. Each chapter draws on a text or body of work, examining its historical context, as well as its international reception and position within world literature. The book presents a dual perspective on Polish literature, combining original readings of key texts with discussions of their two-way connections with other literatures across the globe. With a detailed introduction offering a narrative overview, the book is divided into six sections offering a chronological pathway through the material. Contributors from around the world examine the various cultural exchanges at play, with each chapter including: Definitions of key terms and brief overviews of historical and political events, literary eras, trends, movements, groups, and institutions for those new to the area Analysis and notes on translations, including their hidden dimensions and potential Textual focus on poetics, such as strategies of composition, style, and genre A range of historical, sociological, political, and economic contexts From medieval song through to the contemporary novel, this book offers an interpretive history of Polish literature, while also positioning its significance within world literature. The detailed introductions make it accessible to beginners in the area, while the original analysis and focused case studies will also be of interest to researchers.

Temporalities of Modernism gathers fourteen scholars whose contributions readdress the very tenets of modernism by approaching its multifaceted relationship with time in a series of fresh and original essays. The contemporary energies behind the collection are rooted in the turbulence of the modernist age: relativity, irreversibility, duration, fragmentation, contingency, and the looming threat of the apocalyptic future. The collection includes geographical areas often neglected by the habitual reduction of modernist studies to English-speaking literary high modernism, or to the concentration of famous figures in the traditional capital of modernism—Paris. Thus it offers detailed presentations of Italian pre-WWI modernism, Czech Dadaism, or of Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian writers and artists. The borders also open in terms of genres and mediums, as the contributions are not limited to fiction, but examine the multi-faceted productions of modernist artists: poetry, theatre, painting, music, cinema, photography, etc. In addition, the limits are temporally stretched out as some contributions focus on more recent writers (such as Sylvia Plath) and their reactivation of modernist discoveries.

This is the first comprehensive English-language account of the Polish avant-garde film, from its beginnings in the early decades of the last century to the collapse of communism in 1989. Taking a broad understanding of avant-garde film, this collection includes writings on the pioneering work of the internationally-acclaimed Franciszka and Stefan Themerson; the Polish Futurists' (Jalu Kurek, Anatol Stern) engagement with film; the Thaw and animation (Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Pawlowski, Zbigniew Rybczynski); documentary (Natalia Brzozowska, Kazimierz Karabasz, Wojciech Wiszniewski), Polish émigré filmmakers (Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej Zulawski) as well as essays and documentation on the highly influential Film Form Workshop (Józef Robakowski, Ryszard Wasko, Wojciech Bruszewski). Including a mix of historical writings from early film magazines with commissioned essays, this book constitutes an important source on the rich, complex and diverse history of the Polish film avant-garde, which is presented from the perspective of both British (A. L. Rees, Jonathan Owen, Michael O'Pray) and Polish (Marcin Gizycki, Ryszard Kluszczynski, Kamila Kuc) authorities on the subject. This book is thus an indispensable introduction to the theories and practices of critically important avant-garde artists and filmmakers.