Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz as an Autobiographical Writer (Based on the Short Stories: Koronki weneckie I, Koronki weneckie II, Dzień sierpniowy, Tatarak, Opowiadanie z psem)

Abstract

The article deals with the literary convention called “autobiographism”, which arose as a reaction to the uncontrolled increase of scientific knowledge that took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Generally, the literary convention of autobiographism can be characterised as a method of shaping a work of narrative prose which prompts the reader to establish an analogy between the story’s plot and the writer’s biography. The first works of this type in Polish literature were created in the 1920s, and then spread on a previously unknown scale in the 1960s and 1970s. The article analyses this phenomenon on the example of five short stories by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, written in the years 1940-1958, which present different possibilities of turning biography into literature and, at the same time, show the content that the author could not describe explicitly because it violated cultural taboos.