Zwrot dokonany niedopełniony. Z dziejów nowoczesnego literaturoznawstwa polskiego okresu międzywojennego

Abstract

This paper will take as its starting point the history of Manfred Kridl and the interwar Polish formalist-structuralist school. This school, like many others, fell apart in the aftermath of the WWII and communist domination. However, academic career of Manfred Kridl in Poland consisted of two stages. The first period, till 1932, was interrupted by World War I, working in high schools and part-time at the university in Poland, and four years’ episode in Brussels, was characterized by classic, traditional literary studies from before antipositivist turn, while his activity focused on editorship of works of Polish classics and writing handbooks and textbooks on history of Polish literature. The second period, years 1932-1939/40 was connected with taking the Chair of Polish Studies at Vilnius University and assembling a group of young, talented people form Vilnius, Warsaw and Poznań, who introduced new fashion – modern, post- and antipositivistic literary studies based on Russian formalism and Czech structuralism. It was fundamental novum, change in Polish academic market, while Kirdl became a coryphaeus of new methodological revolution and theoretical turn. He was unquestionable leader of that group. It ought to be remembered that – on the one hand – Kridl was over 50 years old, on the other –the revolution he stared did not complete. That is why I used in the title of the paper the phrase “the turn accomplished not-fulfilled”. There were a lot of reasons, but the main one was the outbreak of war. Moreover, Kridl did not know Russian language, he got to know formalists theory from discussions and reviews of his students or from few translations into Polish. His own work focused on development of integral method (it was his own name for Polish formalist school) and application it to Polish literature. Hence, in this article I used Actor-Network Theory methodological principle to follow the actors, that is why I am taking into consideration a variety of them, among the others: development of railways, perfectly functioning post office, radio as one of the methods of propagating a new theoretical framework, but also more standard, like: publishing books and texts in journals, academic conferences and seminars (e.g. seminar as a laboratory), etc. I rely on archival sources and documents, following the ideas of archival turn and culturalistic non-classical history of humanities and science. In conclusion there are presented (1) post-war fates of Kridl and the other characters of this story, very often extremely tragic, and (2) a few remarks (a kind of cultural fiction) on possibilities of fulfillment of this turn in Polish literary studies in the 1940s and consequence of such a hypothetic situation for whole humanities.