Polish Literature and Genocide presents the attitude of Polish literature to the 20th-century acts of genocide. This volume examines the literary representations of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the massacre in Srebrenica in a rich, detailed, and comprehensive way, expanding the existing research and, in some cases, challenging the former sometimes ossified ideas. Polish literature not only reflects the obvious extermination of Jews and Poles, but also records what had been largely overlooked: the extermination of disabled and mentally ill people, the Roma and Sinti, and the Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis. This volume includes analysis of the literary works of Władysław Szlengel, the most prominent Polish-language poet in the Warsaw ghetto; the peculiar reception of Julian Tuwim’s famous poem for children "Locomotive;" the memoir of Leon Weliczker, a prisoner of the Janowska concentration camp in Lvov and a member of the ‘death brigade’ (Sonderkommando); the origins of Medallions by Zofia Nałkowska, who ‘processed’ historical documents into literature and contributed to the making of professor Rudolf Spanner’s ‘dark legend,’ and the textual origins of Tadeusz Różewicz’s ‘poetry after Auschwitz.’ Furthermore, this volume addresses issues related to the genesis and function of ‘genocide literature’ – aesthetic, cognitive, ideological, and social. This volume will be a crucial resource for academics interested in genocide and Holocaust literary studies.

Polish Literature and Genocide presents the attitude of Polish literature to the 20th-century acts of genocide. This volume examines the literary representations of the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, and the massacre in Srebrenica in a rich, detailed, and comprehensive way, expanding the existing research and, in some cases, challenging the former sometimes ossified ideas. Polish literature not only reflects the obvious extermination of Jews and Poles, but also records what had been largely overlooked: the extermination of disabled and mentally ill people, the Roma and Sinti, and the Soviet prisoners of war by the Nazis. This volume includes analysis of the literary works of Wladyslaw Szlengel, the most prominent Polish-language poet in the Warsaw ghetto; the peculiar reception of Julian Tuwim's famous poem for children "Locomotive;" the memoir of Leon Weliczker, a prisoner of the Janowska concentration camp in Lvov and a member of the 'death brigade' (Sonderkommando); the origins of Medallions by Zofia Nalkowska, who 'processed' historical documents into literature and contributed to the making of professor Rudolf Spanner's 'dark legend,' and the textual origins of Tadeusz Rozewicz's 'poetry after Auschwitz.' Furthermore, this volume addresses issues related to the genesis and function of 'genocide literature' - aesthetic, cognitive, ideological, and social. This volume will be a crucial resource for academics interested in genocide and Holocaust literary studies.

Censorship of Literature in Post-War Poland in the Light of Confidential Bulletins for Censors from 1945 to 1956, reconstructs and presents ways to censor literature (and, contextually, other fields of art) submitted for evaluation to the main censorship office in Poland during the first 11 years after WWII. The source material consists of confidential Bulletins - periodicals addressed to the officials of the censorship office. The book is divided into three main parts, each preceded by an introduction and concluded with an extensive bibliography. Part One: In Search of a Definition: What Were the Confidential Bulletins for Censors? Characteristics of the Source Material presents basic information about the Bulletins - their goals, structure, and material presented in them. The analysis concludes with the definition of confidential Bulletins of the censorship office. Part Two: Literature and Current Literary Phenomena Preconstructs the image of literary life presented in the Bulletins from 1945 to 1956. On numerous occasions, the Bulletins provided helpful guidelines in censorship practice. They discussed the job of dealing with literary texts and often gave examples of works published just a few months earlier or those that had not passed the scrutiny. The Bulletins published materials discussing literary phenomena and other issues. The ones previously unaccounted for (including film, radio and theatre), as well as the institutional background of control, I discuss briefly in the last part - Camera Censorica. What Else was Discussed in the Bulletins?. The materials presented in these confidential periodicals came from the Bulletins headquarters, field offices, and the work of censors. At the end of my study, Author let the censors speak. In the chapter Before the Proper Summary, or... the Censor as an Artist: The Literary Work of the Functionaries of Mysia Street and Its Environs, Author cite evidence of the literary ambitions of political functionaries - as censors had been called in the 1950s.

The presented publication is a type of bibliographic dictionary, compiled by an interdisciplinary team of authors (Byzantynists and Paleoslavists), containing an overview of medieval texts referring to the person of Muhammad, the Arabs, and the circumstances of the birth of Islam, which were known in the Slavia Orthodoxa area (especially in its eastern part, i.e. in Rus'). Therefore, it presents the works written in the Church Slavic language between the 9th and the mid-16th centuries. As the Old Rus' discourse on Islam was shaped under the overwhelming influence of Byzantine literature, the majority of the presented sources are Byzantine texts from the 6th-14th centuries, translated into the literary language of the Orthodox Slavs. The reader will also find here a discussion on several relics, originally created in other languages of the Christian East (Syriac, Arabic) and the West (Latin), which - through the Greek - were assimilated on the Slavic ground. This book aims to fill a gap in previous studies on inter-religious polemics in the Middle Ages, which has usually focused on Christian-Muslim cultural relations, analyzing Greek and Latin texts or the works written in one of the Middle Eastern languages, almost completely ignoring the Church Slavic heritage. It is worth noting that a number of the texts presented here (as well as Slavic translations of Byzantine sources) have not been published so far. The information on them, provided in this monograph, is therefore the result of research conducted directly on the manuscript material.