Tuwim. A Rupture

The monograph is about Julian Tuwim (1894-1953), a prominent poet, a creator of excellent poems for children, and a Polish Jew. The book is divided into three essential parts titled: childlike imagination, Jewishness of fate, civic (dis)obedience. It is a novel attempt in reading Tuwim that is different from the previous interpretations, and a very explicit renewal of his presence in the awareness and the collective imagination of Polish culture. The thought that the poet - a bibliophile, a translator, a curiosity collector, an author of cabaret texts and “a believer in the word” as he called himself - was an author who had experienced tragic fate and had struggled with it bravely in his poetry is the guiding thread of the book. The title of the study also refers to Tuwim’s illness and his death, to the topic of rupture in his poetry and to his dramatic fate as a Polish Jew. The part of the book dedicated to Tuwim’s predilection for Jesus Christ and Frederic Chopin is an anacrusis. Among the issues brought up here afresh - although already existing in the source literature - are the revolutionary take in the context of Rimbaud’s reception, the re-reading of the poet as the one who writes as a child, the parts about cities, the attempt to interpret the manifesto My, Żydzi Polscy [We, Polish Jews]. The book is enriched by unpublished until now passages of hand-written notes made by the poet’s sister, Irena Tuwim - also a poet and a known translator - and by other sources unused in previous monographs.