The work offers a presentation of three important problems present in the literary
output of Jan Józef Szczepański, which make him the writer of the 1920s
generation, the writer of the intelligentsia, and the writer expressing his ideas on
the tasks of art and artist.
The image of the generation present in Szczepański’s works confirms the theoretical
remarks about this sociological and literary phenomenon. What can be
observed are the clearly stressed common experiences of the generation, the consciousness
of the group belonging and its differences from other generations as
well as the exceptional character of their fates. The initial mytholigization of the
generation consisting in its entanglement in the “silent action” gives way to the
creation of the generational legend resulting, to a large extent, from the policy of
the People’s Poland: degradation of the merits of the part of the generation who
fought in the anti-communist underground army in World War II, repression’s or
removal from the literary scene of a numerous group of people. Another factor is
the imperfection of human memory which, after some time, “forgets” or gives up
to some versions of historical of collective memory. Such comments can be found
in the short story Glow Behind the Forest (Łuna za lasem) and in the essay In the
Service of the Great Charterer (W służbie Wielkiego Armatora).
The intelligentsia aspects of the work of Jan Józef Szczepański discussed in
Chapter II concentrate on four main problems: 1. the creation of the protagonist,
for whom, in most of his works, the consciousness of belonging to the intelligentsia
as a group of people coming from a particular tradition and representing
a given ethos was decisive as regards the selection of attitude and the determination
of one’s own position in the face of reality, 2. reflection of the pre-war intelligentsia
ethos heritage against the historical and political changes which
affected the Polish society between September 1939 and the events following
1989,3. the positive evaluation of traditional, i.e. pre-war, ethos of the intelligentsia, 4. the expression of the aims and aspirations of the traditional Polish intelligentsia
in the years of the People’s Poland. The paradigm of the intelligentsia
character is determined by a few elements. Among them is the stress put by the
protagonists on the peculiar social status and the accentuation of the relations
with the traditional ethos of the member of the Polish intelligentsia. It can be
observed that in the subsequent works these relations is are marked more and
more clearly by Szczepański, which finds it exponent in the growing consciousness
of the roots and world of values which the protagonist follows in his life.
Generally, the writer creates protagonists faithful to the ethos of the intelligentsia.
The characteristic feature of their attitude is the perception of the conflict between
the believed - in hierarchy of values and the norms of conduct, and the threats
caused by the circumstances destructive of the given order of the world: by the
war waged on a total scale, material and social degradation, the system of totalitarian
power, the enticements of power. The author presents the life of a member
of the Polish intelligentsia both before and during the war along with the ethical
choices accompanying that life. The evaluation of the intelligentsia tradition has
become the next question undertaken by the writer. A distinguishing feature of
Szczepański’s work is the acceptance of that tradition, and in his recently published
works, especially in the short story A Day Passes (Mija Dzień) an obvious
mythologization of the heritage of the II Polish Republic is discernible as the
formula of the escapist attitude.
In the works devoted to the reflection on the essence of art and artist the constant
presence of a few questions and the steadiness in the presentation of ideas
must be underlined. The author of The Reef (Rafa) presents the conception of art
and artist referring to the classical definition in which, next to the immanent aesthetic
values, the ethical issues turn out to be equally relevant - art, though ontologically
independent, always carries a message, an idea based on axiological
assumptions. The writer frequently underlines his own idea on the mutual relations
of the artist and the work and assumes the artist’s attitude to be the basic
criterion of the evaluation of art, positively valorising the independence of his
actions, the sincerity of expression, and the attempts to transgress the borders of
the common human experience which he calls the desire of transcendence. He
predicts that there are two ways of creative realisation: the first one consist in
giving testimony to reality - here the ethical aspect of art is dominating, the other
one is the artistic creativity and ludism. The first one is fathered by Conrad as the
creator of the concept of literature positing demanding tasks, predominantly
ethical, for the writer. In this sense his program is similar to Norwid’s idea of the
mutual dependence of word and act in the life of an artist. Norwid is another, on
top of Conrad, patron of Szczepańskie creative duties. What dominates in the
reflections of the author of The Reef over the essence of art is the stress put on
art’s relation transcendence, that is to say the attempts at transgressing the borders available to human experience. The writer expresses his conviction that this the
feature of free art, the art which is independent from external influences: ideology,
fashion, public demand, the market mechanisms which treat works of art as
consumer goods or capital investment. The presentation of the threats for an artist
in the contemporary world becomes one of the main points of the literary program
of the author of The Cadence (Kadencja). The writer sees creativity as the basic
domain of life of both and individual and the society. Szczepanski’s attitude to the
role of the writer and literature in social life is particularly interesting, for he
endows them with an enormous power of affecting the memory and of shaping
consciousness, not only aesthetical, but first of all of cultural, civilizational, and
moral consciousness. In the literature which gives testimony to its time there are
the possibilities which are incomparably greater than the possibilities of scholarly
treatises or the short-lived political actions. The author of numerous works undertaking
the authotelic problematic delimits in this way the positive program of
creativity based on the power of the word. He frequently made use of this privilege,
concentrating in his works on the problems which were strongly connected
with the social life and the experiences of the man living in the second half of the
20th century
