English
Polish
Marek Hłasko’s short story “Szukając gwiazd” [Searching for the stars] as a parable of the Holocaust and a mythical “initial event” in his )
Paweł Dobrosielski
redakcja@holocaustresearch.pl Biokulturoznawca, tłumacz, student MISHu (na kierunku filozofia), doktorant w Instytucie Kultury Polskiej na Wydziale Polonistyki UW. Zainteresowania badawcze: Holokaust w kulturze współczesnej, filozofia hermeneutyczna
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1632-2325
doctoral student at the Graduate School for Social Research of the Department of Cultural Studies, Warsaw Uniwersity
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 4 (2008), pages: 408-412
Publication date: 2008-11-02
Abstract
Marek Hłasko’s short story Szukając gwiazd was published in 1963. It has all the properties of a parable and is a kind of parable about the Holocaust. Its conventional character points to the ethical controversies related to such a kind of Holocaust presentation, i.e. we deal here with the temptation of universalisation. The hero undergoes a specific rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, centred around the Holocaust, being at the same time a mythical “original event”, underpinning the existential condition of “a man without innocence” – a figure designed by Marek Hłasko. The boy will later become all the men in the writer’s stories and novels. What is interesting is the superposition of a typical Hłasko motive, i.e. frustrated love, on the Holocaust situation, and the resultant impossibility of an authentic encounter between the I and the Other. Existential loneliness and being lost in the world are combined with the memory of the Holocaust.
Keywords
Marek Hłasko, Szukając gwiazd (Searching for the stars), Holocaust literature
License
Copyright (c) 2008 Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Other articles by the same auhtor(s)
- Paweł Dobrosielski, Defenders of Faith. Key Disputes on the Polish-Jewish Past Since 2015 , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 18 (2022)
- Marcin Napiórkowski, Paweł Dobrosielski, Forgiveness as a Category of Modern Memory Discourse as Seen in Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz’s Kinderszenen and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness , Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały: No. 7 (2011)
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