Review article
Sub specie polonitatis: Zofia Nałkowska on Polish Writers
Tea Rogić Musa
; AI pregled Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography
Abstract
The article examines the literary-critical work of the Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska, situating it within her broader cultural and transnational engagements. It considers her connections with Croatian literature and theatre in the interwar period, her close relationships with Croatian intellectuals, and her position within Polish cultural and public life in the span in which she published her critical essays. The analysis also takes into account her own literary production. The selected reviews and short critical texts were chosen according to two criteria: their representativeness for Nałkowska’s prose poetics and critical methodology, and their relevance to the Polish literary-historical canon as shaped in the post-war period—a canon in which Nałkowska herself ultimately came to occupy a prominent place. Although her critical writings were produced sporadically and often reflect a markedly subjective perspective, they offer valuable insights into the interdependence of her biography, her public intellectual persona—widely regarded as that of a literary arbiter in 1930s Warsaw—and her understanding of the Polish literary tradition. These texts also illuminate the eclectic yet democratic manner in which, as a modernist and a key figure of women’s modernism in interwar Polish literature, Nałkowska conceptualized the national literary canon and the broader shift in poetics from positivism toward the avant-garde.
Keywords
Zofia Nałkowska; literary criticism; Polish literature; women’s modernism; Polish–Croatian literary relations
Hrčak ID:
342304
URI
Publication date:
22.12.2025.
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