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
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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
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