{"id":6389,"date":"2022-09-02T21:14:28","date_gmt":"2022-09-02T19:14:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?p=6389"},"modified":"2022-09-23T07:26:47","modified_gmt":"2022-09-23T05:26:47","slug":"aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/","title":{"rendered":"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Episode 20 and all video recordings are available at:<br><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/channel\/UCdhCikwUyBX6xSRNML2mAlw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Polish Cultural Institute New York YouTube<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\nhttps:\/\/youtu.be\/bxq1oQ-c7HY\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Encounters with Polish Literature<\/strong>&nbsp;is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host&nbsp;<strong>David A. Goldfarb<\/strong>&nbsp;will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature.&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/encounters-with-polish-literature\">More about the Encounters with Polish Literature series<\/a><\/strong>&nbsp;and the timeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Aleksander Wat <\/strong>(1900-1967) was a poet immersed in contradiction. He was part of the first wave of avantgardism when Poland regained its independence after WWI and with Anatol Stern authored a manifesto that declared itself to be both futurist and primitivist. He is remembered primarily for his panoramic memoir,&nbsp;<em>My Century<\/em>, edited from tape recorded conversations with Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz, recounting his imprisonments as a leftist under the Pi\u0142sudski regime between the wars, and then later under the Soviets, and his encounters with many of the major figures in Polish culture during the Communist period. He came from a mixed family of the Polish-Jewish intelligentsia, his father coming from a distinguished cabalistic tradition with a broad interest in European philosophy, his mother a nominal Polish Christian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In this episode we explore some of Wat\u2019s internal conflicts, looking at the \u201cGga\u201d manifesto, and selected passages from his later poetry and from&nbsp;<em>My Century<\/em>, as well as some of the considerations about the relationship between truth and reality that he makes in his essays about Stalinist culture and socialist realism, which literary historians in the Slavic field would do well to read alongside Russian critics of Soviet literature like Andrei Sinyavsky. Wat published a small but potent body of work, most of which is translated in the collections listed in the bibliography for this episode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Selected works by Aleksander Wat in English translation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Wat, Aleksander.&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/slavica.indiana.edu\/bookListings\/Literature\/Against_the_Devil_in_History\"><strong>Against the Devil in History<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. Tr. Frank L. Vigoda. Ed. and intro. by Gwido Zlatkes. Bloomington, In.: Slavica, 2018.<br>Wat, Aleksander.&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/nupress.northwestern.edu\/9780810108400\/lucifer-unemployed\/\"><strong>Lucifer Unemployed<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. Tr. Lillian Vallee. Foreword. by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.<br>Wat, Aleksander. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nyrb.com\/products\/my-century?variant=1094930385\"><em><strong>My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual<\/strong><\/em><\/a>. Ed. and tr. by Richard Lourie. Foreword by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz. New York: New York Review Books, 1988.<br>Wat, Aleksander.&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.abebooks.com\/products\/isbn\/9780880011839?cm_sp=bdp-_-ISBN10-_-PLP\"><strong>With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. Tr. and ed. by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz and Leonard Nathan. New York: Ecco, 1989.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Recommended<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Venclova, Tomas.&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/yalebooks.yale.edu\/book\/9780300183054\/aleksander-wat\/\"><strong>Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast<\/strong><\/a><\/em>. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.<br>Wat, Aleksander and Stern, Anatol.&nbsp;<em><a href=\"https:\/\/rcin.org.pl\/dlibra\/publication\/53061\/edition\/66709?language=pl\"><strong>Gga: I polski almanach futurystyczny<\/strong><\/a><\/em>&nbsp;(<em>Gga: First Polish Futurist Almanac<\/em>, in Polish).&nbsp;Futur Polski: Warsaw, 1920. IBL PAN, sygn. P.II.198.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/MPM2-1024x684.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6390\" width=\"511\" height=\"341\" srcset=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/MPM2-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/MPM2-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/MPM2-768x513.jpg 768w, https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/MPM2-1536x1025.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/MPM2-2048x1367.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 511px) 100vw, 511px\" \/><figcaption>Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n<p><strong>Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski<\/strong>, The Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature and Head of Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a tenured research professor at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Jagiellonian University, Krak\u00f3w, Poland), which he created in 2007. He taught at Harvard (2002), Northwestern (2003), and Brown (2009). In 2005 he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. In 2008 he was a senior researcher in the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. Since 2008 he has been the Artistic Director of the Joseph Conrad International Festival of Literature in Krak\u00f3w, Poland, one of the most important European literary festivals (more than 1000 artists featured).&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since 1997 he has published more than 40 volumes of individual books, editions, translations on literature and philosophy, and over 400 essays, articles, and columns in professional journals, cultural monthlies, weeklies, and newspapers. He authored monographs on Derrida, Nietzsche, Gombrowicz, Schulz, and modern Polish literature. He co-authored&nbsp;<em>Literary Theories in the 20th Century<\/em>, a classic textbook in the history of literary methodologies. He is a co-editor of two influential series in the Polish humanities:&nbsp;<em>Hermeneia&nbsp;<\/em>and&nbsp;<em>Horizons of Modernity<\/em>&nbsp;(over 120 volumes), and sits on the Editorial Boards of leading academic journals in&nbsp;Poland.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Awarded with \u201cLiteratura na \u015awiecie\u201d [The World Literature] prize in the category of comparative literature for his books on Derrida and Nietzsche (1997), The Ko\u015bcielscy Prize for essay writing (2000), and the Kazimierz Wyka Prize for lifetime achievement in literary criticism (2011). He also received the most prestigious academic subvention in Poland called \u201cMaster Grant\u201d from the Polish Science Foundation (2006-2010) for his project \u201cThe Humanities after Deconstruction,\u201d the result of which was the book&nbsp;<em>The Politics of Sensibility: An Introduction to the Humanities<\/em>&nbsp;(2013). His recent book,&nbsp;<em>Wars of Modern Tribes.<\/em>&nbsp;<em>Arguing about Reality in the Age of Populism<\/em>&nbsp;(Krak\u00f3w 2019) was listed by an influential Polish weekly \u201cPolityka\u201d as one of the \u201c20 books that you must read to understand the contemporary world\u201d. The most recent book,&nbsp;<em>Poland, Bliss, University: An Educational Story<\/em>, with the two volumes mentioned above, creates a 1000-page political commentary on the present condition of the humanities.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As a translator, he brought into Polish works by Proust, Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Rorty, and Perec. He edited and prefaced the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Besides academic writing, he penned six collections of literary essays:&nbsp;<em>Anatomy of Curiosity<\/em>&nbsp;(1999),&nbsp;<em>Excess: Essays on Writing and Reading<\/em>&nbsp;(2002),&nbsp;<em>Desire and Idolatry<\/em>&nbsp;(2004),&nbsp;<em>Life Measured by Literature<\/em>&nbsp;(2007), and&nbsp;<em>Sun, Possibility, and Joy<\/em>&nbsp;(2010),&nbsp;<em>Day on Earth: Traveling Prose<\/em>&nbsp;(2014; which combines fiction, travel essays, and photography and was long-listed for \u201cAngelus,\u201d the Central-European Award in Literature). His last collection of literary essays (<em>The Dribble<\/em>&nbsp;2015) has been shortlisted for the \u201cGdynia Prize\u201d in the \u201cessay\u201d category. In the international Austeria Publishing house (Krak\u00f3w-Budapest), he published 3&nbsp;<em>Travel Notebooks<\/em>&nbsp;with photographs from the U.S., India, and Andalusia. Markowski\u2019s books and essays have been translated into several languages: English, French, Belarussian, German, Ukrainian, Romanian, Swedish, Hungarian, Slovakian, and Bulgarian. In January 2015, he had an individual exhibition of photographs called&nbsp;<em>Line and Land<\/em>&nbsp;in the Dreambox Gallery in Chicago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Bartek Remisko, Executive Producer<\/em><br><em>David A. Goldfarb, Host &amp; Producer&nbsp;<\/em><br><em>Natalia Iyudin, Producer<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-04-01-at-12.27.10-PM-1536x732-1-2-1024x488.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-6391\" width=\"563\" height=\"268\" srcset=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-04-01-at-12.27.10-PM-1536x732-1-2-1024x488.png 1024w, https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-04-01-at-12.27.10-PM-1536x732-1-2-300x143.png 300w, https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-04-01-at-12.27.10-PM-1536x732-1-2-768x366.png 768w, https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Screen-Shot-2022-04-01-at-12.27.10-PM-1536x732-1-2.png 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 563px) 100vw, 563px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Episode 20 and all video recordings are available at:Polish Cultural Institute New York YouTube Encounters with Polish Literature&nbsp;is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host&nbsp;David A. Goldfarb&nbsp;will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":6396,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-literature","category-polish-jewish"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"pl_PL\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Episode 20 and all video recordings are available at:Polish Cultural Institute New York YouTube Encounters with Polish Literature&nbsp;is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host&nbsp;David A. Goldfarb&nbsp;will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2022-09-02T19:14:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2022-09-23T05:26:47+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1500\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"klaudia\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Napisane przez\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"klaudia\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Szacowany czas czytania\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minut\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"event\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/\",\"name\":\"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":[\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg\",\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px-300x200.jpg\",\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px-1024x683.jpg\",\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg\"],\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2022-09-02T19:14:28+02:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2022-09-23T05:26:47+02:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/04d40cd80c1729a7f440613bee4073b6\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"pl-PL\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/\"]}],\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"startDate\":\"2022-09-01\",\"endDate\":\"2022-09-01\",\"eventStatus\":\"EventScheduled\",\"eventAttendanceMode\":\"OfflineEventAttendanceMode\",\"location\":{\"@type\":\"place\",\"name\":\"\",\"address\":\"\",\"geo\":{\"@type\":\"GeoCoordinates\",\"latitude\":\"\",\"longitude\":\"\"}},\"description\":\"Episode 20 and all video recordings are available at:Polish Cultural Institute New York YouTube\\nEncounters with Polish Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish Literature series and the timeline.\\nAleksander Wat (1900-1967) was a poet immersed in contradiction. He was part of the first wave of avantgardism when Poland regained its independence after WWI and with Anatol Stern authored a manifesto that declared itself to be both futurist and primitivist. He is remembered primarily for his panoramic memoir, My Century, edited from tape recorded conversations with Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz, recounting his imprisonments as a leftist under the Pi\u0142sudski regime between the wars, and then later under the Soviets, and his encounters with many of the major figures in Polish culture during the Communist period. He came from a mixed family of the Polish-Jewish intelligentsia, his father coming from a distinguished cabalistic tradition with a broad interest in European philosophy, his mother a nominal Polish Christian.\\nIn this episode we explore some of Wat\u2019s internal conflicts, looking at the \u201cGga\u201d manifesto, and selected passages from his later poetry and from My Century, as well as some of the considerations about the relationship between truth and reality that he makes in his essays about Stalinist culture and socialist realism, which literary historians in the Slavic field would do well to read alongside Russian critics of Soviet literature like Andrei Sinyavsky. Wat published a small but potent body of work, most of which is translated in the collections listed in the bibliography for this episode.\\nSelected works by Aleksander Wat in English translation\\nWat, Aleksander. Against the Devil in History. Tr. Frank L. Vigoda. Ed. and intro. by Gwido Zlatkes. Bloomington, In.: Slavica, 2018.Wat, Aleksander. Lucifer Unemployed. Tr. Lillian Vallee. Foreword. by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.Wat, Aleksander. My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Ed. and tr. by Richard Lourie. Foreword by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz. New York: New York Review Books, 1988.Wat, Aleksander. With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat. Tr. and ed. by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz and Leonard Nathan. New York: Ecco, 1989.\\nRecommended\\nVenclova, Tomas. Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.Wat, Aleksander and Stern, Anatol. Gga: I polski almanach futurystyczny (Gga: First Polish Futurist Almanac, in Polish). Futur Polski: Warsaw, 1920. IBL PAN, sygn. P.II.198.\\nMicha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski, The Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature and Head of Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a tenured research professor at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Jagiellonian University, Krak\u00f3w, Poland), which he created in 2007. He taught at Harvard (2002), Northwestern (2003), and Brown (2009). In 2005 he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. In 2008 he was a senior researcher in the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. Since 2008 he has been the Artistic Director of the Joseph Conrad International Festival of Literature in Krak\u00f3w, Poland, one of the most important European literary festivals (more than 1000 artists featured). \\nSince 1997 he has published more than 40 volumes of individual books, editions, translations on literature and philosophy, and over 400 essays, articles, and columns in professional journals, cultural monthlies, weeklies, and newspapers. He authored monographs on Derrida, Nietzsche, Gombrowicz, Schulz, and modern Polish literature. He co-authored Literary Theories in the 20th Century, a classic textbook in the history of literary methodologies. He is a co-editor of two influential series in the Polish humanities: Hermeneia and Horizons of Modernity (over 120 volumes), and sits on the Editorial Boards of leading academic journals in Poland. \\nAwarded with \u201cLiteratura na \u015awiecie\u201d [The World Literature] prize in the category of comparative literature for his books on Derrida and Nietzsche (1997), The Ko\u015bcielscy Prize for essay writing (2000), and the Kazimierz Wyka Prize for lifetime achievement in literary criticism (2011). He also received the most prestigious academic subvention in Poland called \u201cMaster Grant\u201d from the Polish Science Foundation (2006-2010) for his project \u201cThe Humanities after Deconstruction,\u201d the result of which was the book The Politics of Sensibility: An Introduction to the Humanities (2013). His recent book, Wars of Modern Tribes. Arguing about Reality in the Age of Populism (Krak\u00f3w 2019) was listed by an influential Polish weekly \u201cPolityka\u201d as one of the \u201c20 books that you must read to understand the contemporary world\u201d. The most recent book, Poland, Bliss, University: An Educational Story, with the two volumes mentioned above, creates a 1000-page political commentary on the present condition of the humanities. \\nAs a translator, he brought into Polish works by Proust, Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Rorty, and Perec. He edited and prefaced the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva.\\nBesides academic writing, he penned six collections of literary essays: Anatomy of Curiosity (1999), Excess: Essays on Writing and Reading (2002), Desire and Idolatry (2004), Life Measured by Literature (2007), and Sun, Possibility, and Joy (2010), Day on Earth: Traveling Prose (2014; which combines fiction, travel essays, and photography and was long-listed for \u201cAngelus,\u201d the Central-European Award in Literature). His last collection of literary essays (The Dribble 2015) has been shortlisted for the \u201cGdynia Prize\u201d in the \u201cessay\u201d category. In the international Austeria Publishing house (Krak\u00f3w-Budapest), he published 3 Travel Notebooks with photographs from the U.S., India, and Andalusia. Markowski\u2019s books and essays have been translated into several languages: English, French, Belarussian, German, Ukrainian, Romanian, Swedish, Hungarian, Slovakian, and Bulgarian. In January 2015, he had an individual exhibition of photographs called Line and Land in the Dreambox Gallery in Chicago.\\nBartek Remisko, Executive ProducerDavid A. Goldfarb, Host &amp; Producer Natalia Iyudin, Producer\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"pl-PL\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg\",\"width\":1500,\"height\":1000},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/\",\"name\":\"Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku\",\"description\":\"Instytuty Polskie\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"pl-PL\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/04d40cd80c1729a7f440613bee4073b6\",\"name\":\"klaudia\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"pl-PL\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/649cd2d4f6b3f48c5bf42d51f7e665fb?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/649cd2d4f6b3f48c5bf42d51f7e665fb?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"klaudia\"},\"sameAs\":[\"http:\/\/lukasz.sienkiewicz@msz.gov.pl\"],\"url\":\"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/author\/stypulkowskaa\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/","og_locale":"pl_PL","og_type":"article","og_title":"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski - Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","og_description":"Episode 20 and all video recordings are available at:Polish Cultural Institute New York YouTube Encounters with Polish Literature&nbsp;is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host&nbsp;David A. Goldfarb&nbsp;will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in [&hellip;]","og_url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/","og_site_name":"Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","article_published_time":"2022-09-02T19:14:28+00:00","article_modified_time":"2022-09-23T05:26:47+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1500,"height":1000,"url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"klaudia","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Napisane przez":"klaudia","Szacowany czas czytania":"7 minut"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"event","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/","url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/","name":"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#primaryimage"},"image":["https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg","https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px-300x200.jpg","https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px-1024x683.jpg","https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg"],"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg","datePublished":"2022-09-02T19:14:28+02:00","dateModified":"2022-09-23T05:26:47+02:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/04d40cd80c1729a7f440613bee4073b6"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"pl-PL","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/"]}],"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","startDate":"2022-09-01","endDate":"2022-09-01","eventStatus":"EventScheduled","eventAttendanceMode":"OfflineEventAttendanceMode","location":{"@type":"place","name":"","address":"","geo":{"@type":"GeoCoordinates","latitude":"","longitude":""}},"description":"Episode 20 and all video recordings are available at:Polish Cultural Institute New York YouTube\nEncounters with Polish Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish Literature series and the timeline.\nAleksander Wat (1900-1967) was a poet immersed in contradiction. He was part of the first wave of avantgardism when Poland regained its independence after WWI and with Anatol Stern authored a manifesto that declared itself to be both futurist and primitivist. He is remembered primarily for his panoramic memoir, My Century, edited from tape recorded conversations with Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz, recounting his imprisonments as a leftist under the Pi\u0142sudski regime between the wars, and then later under the Soviets, and his encounters with many of the major figures in Polish culture during the Communist period. He came from a mixed family of the Polish-Jewish intelligentsia, his father coming from a distinguished cabalistic tradition with a broad interest in European philosophy, his mother a nominal Polish Christian.\nIn this episode we explore some of Wat\u2019s internal conflicts, looking at the \u201cGga\u201d manifesto, and selected passages from his later poetry and from My Century, as well as some of the considerations about the relationship between truth and reality that he makes in his essays about Stalinist culture and socialist realism, which literary historians in the Slavic field would do well to read alongside Russian critics of Soviet literature like Andrei Sinyavsky. Wat published a small but potent body of work, most of which is translated in the collections listed in the bibliography for this episode.\nSelected works by Aleksander Wat in English translation\nWat, Aleksander. Against the Devil in History. Tr. Frank L. Vigoda. Ed. and intro. by Gwido Zlatkes. Bloomington, In.: Slavica, 2018.Wat, Aleksander. Lucifer Unemployed. Tr. Lillian Vallee. Foreword. by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.Wat, Aleksander. My Century: The Odyssey of a Polish Intellectual. Ed. and tr. by Richard Lourie. Foreword by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz. New York: New York Review Books, 1988.Wat, Aleksander. With the Skin: Poems of Aleksander Wat. Tr. and ed. by Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz and Leonard Nathan. New York: Ecco, 1989.\nRecommended\nVenclova, Tomas. Aleksander Wat: Life and Art of an Iconoclast. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996.Wat, Aleksander and Stern, Anatol. Gga: I polski almanach futurystyczny (Gga: First Polish Futurist Almanac, in Polish). Futur Polski: Warsaw, 1920. IBL PAN, sygn. P.II.198.\nMicha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski, The Stefan and Lucy Hejna Family Chair in Polish Language and Literature and Head of Department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a tenured research professor at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Jagiellonian University, Krak\u00f3w, Poland), which he created in 2007. He taught at Harvard (2002), Northwestern (2003), and Brown (2009). In 2005 he was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta. In 2008 he was a senior researcher in the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften in Vienna. Since 2008 he has been the Artistic Director of the Joseph Conrad International Festival of Literature in Krak\u00f3w, Poland, one of the most important European literary festivals (more than 1000 artists featured). \nSince 1997 he has published more than 40 volumes of individual books, editions, translations on literature and philosophy, and over 400 essays, articles, and columns in professional journals, cultural monthlies, weeklies, and newspapers. He authored monographs on Derrida, Nietzsche, Gombrowicz, Schulz, and modern Polish literature. He co-authored Literary Theories in the 20th Century, a classic textbook in the history of literary methodologies. He is a co-editor of two influential series in the Polish humanities: Hermeneia and Horizons of Modernity (over 120 volumes), and sits on the Editorial Boards of leading academic journals in Poland. \nAwarded with \u201cLiteratura na \u015awiecie\u201d [The World Literature] prize in the category of comparative literature for his books on Derrida and Nietzsche (1997), The Ko\u015bcielscy Prize for essay writing (2000), and the Kazimierz Wyka Prize for lifetime achievement in literary criticism (2011). He also received the most prestigious academic subvention in Poland called \u201cMaster Grant\u201d from the Polish Science Foundation (2006-2010) for his project \u201cThe Humanities after Deconstruction,\u201d the result of which was the book The Politics of Sensibility: An Introduction to the Humanities (2013). His recent book, Wars of Modern Tribes. Arguing about Reality in the Age of Populism (Krak\u00f3w 2019) was listed by an influential Polish weekly \u201cPolityka\u201d as one of the \u201c20 books that you must read to understand the contemporary world\u201d. The most recent book, Poland, Bliss, University: An Educational Story, with the two volumes mentioned above, creates a 1000-page political commentary on the present condition of the humanities. \nAs a translator, he brought into Polish works by Proust, Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Kristeva, Rorty, and Perec. He edited and prefaced the writings of Friedrich Schlegel, Marcel Proust, Roland Barthes, and Julia Kristeva.\nBesides academic writing, he penned six collections of literary essays: Anatomy of Curiosity (1999), Excess: Essays on Writing and Reading (2002), Desire and Idolatry (2004), Life Measured by Literature (2007), and Sun, Possibility, and Joy (2010), Day on Earth: Traveling Prose (2014; which combines fiction, travel essays, and photography and was long-listed for \u201cAngelus,\u201d the Central-European Award in Literature). His last collection of literary essays (The Dribble 2015) has been shortlisted for the \u201cGdynia Prize\u201d in the \u201cessay\u201d category. In the international Austeria Publishing house (Krak\u00f3w-Budapest), he published 3 Travel Notebooks with photographs from the U.S., India, and Andalusia. Markowski\u2019s books and essays have been translated into several languages: English, French, Belarussian, German, Ukrainian, Romanian, Swedish, Hungarian, Slovakian, and Bulgarian. In January 2015, he had an individual exhibition of photographs called Line and Land in the Dreambox Gallery in Chicago.\nBartek Remisko, Executive ProducerDavid A. Goldfarb, Host &amp; Producer Natalia Iyudin, Producer"},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"pl-PL","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2022\/09\/Wat-books202208301500px.jpg","width":1500,"height":1000},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/09\/02\/aleksander-wat-with-michal-pawel-markowski\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Aleksander Wat with Micha\u0142 Pawe\u0142 Markowski"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#website","url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/","name":"Instytut Polski w Nowym Jorku","description":"Instytuty Polskie","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"pl-PL"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/04d40cd80c1729a7f440613bee4073b6","name":"klaudia","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"pl-PL","@id":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/649cd2d4f6b3f48c5bf42d51f7e665fb?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/649cd2d4f6b3f48c5bf42d51f7e665fb?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"klaudia"},"sameAs":["http:\/\/lukasz.sienkiewicz@msz.gov.pl"],"url":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/author\/stypulkowskaa\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6389"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6395,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6389\/revisions\/6395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}