Aleksander Wat’s Poems of the 1940s

• In Event: Contacts across Borders: The Literary (Neo-)Avant-Gardes between Central Europe and the USSR

Abstract

This paper discusses five poems published by a Polish-Jewish author Aleksander Wat (1900–1967) in the journal “Nowiny Literackie” in the year 1948, that is in between Wat’s early avant-garde poetry publications (1920) and his first postwar poetry book (1957). The poems mark the period when Wat was returning to writing poetry after a long hiatus. The paper shows that these five texts share interesting characteristics, even though they were composed in different years (1941–1947), and with reference to diverse contexts, especially Wat’s wartime imprisonment in the Soviet Union and his experience of the Holocaust. The last of these five texts, a Holocaust poem written in postwar Poland in 1947, is dedicated to Paul Eluard, a French surrealist poet, an encounter with whom in 1947 inspired this piece and the publication as a whole. The paper attempts to recover the sources of uncommon images in Wat’s Holocaust poems from “Nowiny Literackie,” in connection with Wat’s experiences in the Soviet Union and Eluard’s impact on his work.

Author

• Aleksandra Kremer, Harvard U