autor: Anna Frajlich
tytuł: The Ghost of Shakespeare: Collected Essays
Edited by Ronald Meyer
Cover art by Janusz Kapusta
Series: Polish Studies
ISBN: 9781644694718 (hardcover)
Pages: 308 pp.
Publication Date: November 2020

This volume collects the critical prose of award-winning writer Anna Frajlich. The Ghost of Shakespeare takes its name from Frajlich’s essay on Nobel Prize laureate Wisława Szymborska, but informs her approach as a comparativist more generally as she considers the work of major Polish writers of the twentieth century, including Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Bruno Schulz. Frajlich’s study of the Roman theme in Russian Symbolism owes its origins to her stay in the Eternal City, the second stop on her exile from Poland in 1969. The book concludes with autobiographical essays that describe her parents’ dramatic flight from Poland at the outbreak of the war, her own exile from Poland in 1969, settling in New York City, and building her career as a scholar and leading poet of her generation.

Anna Frajlich (Senior Lecturer Emerita) taught Polish language and literature at Columbia University for over three decades. She is author of ten books of poetry and three bilingual editions (English, French, Italian). In 2002 she received The Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit, awarded by the President of the Polish Republic. Frajlich is also the recipient of literary awards from Kościelski Foundation, Turzański Foundation, and the Union of Polish Writers in Exile.

Ronald Meyer is Publications Editor at the Harriman Institute. He teaches the seminar in Russian literary translation at Columbia University.

Praise
“Written over the author’s long career as a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher, these essays include pieces of insightful academic criticism, expert comparative studies, personal reminiscences, autobiographical sketches, and philosophical reflections on literature’s entanglements with modern history. A perceptive reader will notice that this seemingly diverse mixture of subjects and styles arranges itself into a perfectly integrated and evocative whole. It is a complex yet clearly delineated map of a spiritual and material journey of the author—an exile and involuntary wanderer—in search of a home, a sense of belonging, an identity, and self-affirmation. It is a chronicle of a personal odyssey in which literature, in all its forms and manifestations, played a decisive and salutary role. Intelligent and inspiring, the book is one of the best testimonials of the enduring intellectual, spiritual and moral impact of letters in our endlessly challenging and perplexing times.”
— Jaroslaw Anders, Polish literary critic and translator
“Few contemporary writers in exile can match Anna Frajlich’s stature as a major poet, essayist, and teacher of literature. In this collection of essays she presents the reader with thoroughly original interpretations of the giants of twentieth-century Polish literature—Bruno Schulz, Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wisława Szymborska—but also the lesser known poets and novelists who deserve general recognition. Also welcome are her analyses of several Russian Symbolist poets and of the Ukrainian Vasyl Makhno, and the reflections on her triple identity: Polish, Jewish, American, in mixed order. Add to that her unorthodox commentary on currently debated aspects of modernity, and the amazement at the scope of this compact book will be more than justified.”
— Joanna Rostropowicz Clark, Princeton Research Forum
Table of Contents
Author’s Preface

Part One: On Poetry

1. Czesław Miłosz: The Ambivalent Landscape of Return
2. He Also Knew How to Be Gracious (Czesław Miłosz)
3. From Common Servant to Lot’s Wife (Wisława Szymborska)
4. Intellect Imbued with Clarity, Grace, and Humor: Notes on Wisława Szymborska
5. The Ghost of Shakespeare in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborska
6. The Last Time We Saw Her . . . (Wisława Szymborska)
7. Apollo and Marsyas: A Tribute to Zbigniew Herbert
8. Poet of the Seventh Climate: Recurrent Images in the Poetry of Bronisław Przyłuski
9. A Canon of His Own (Vasyl Makhno)
10. Must Poetry Be Absolutely Modern?

Part Two: On Polish Prose

11. Two Unknown Soldiers (Józef Wittlin)
12. Bruno Schulz: Mythmaker and Legend
13. The Lifelong Passion of Jerzy Ficowski
14. Jealousy, Sex, and Character: Michał Choromański and Otto Weininger
15. Narrative Strategies: The Case of Andrzej Bobkowski
16. Henryk Grynberg: His Quest for Artistic and Non-Artistic Truth
17. Finding the Way between Globalization and Decentralization: Polish Literature after 1989

Part Three: On Russian Symbolist Poetry

18. Three Great Romans in Valery Bryusov’s Poetry
19. The Contradictions of the Northern Pilgrim: Dmitry Merezhkovsky
20. The Quest for Pax Romana as a Quest for Peace of Mind. Vasily Komarovsky
21. The Scepter of the Far East and the Crown of the Third Rome: The Russo-Japanese War in the Mirror of Russian Poetry

Part Four: Autobiography

22. My Native Realm
23. My “Unprocessed” Holocaust
24. March Began in June: My “Processed” Trauma
25. The Price of Integrity
26. Cultural Diversity in the Workplace
27. Writing Polish in America
28. Identity and Difference: The Power of Language

Afterword
Departures, Returns, Memory: The Collected Essays of Anna Frajlich

Bibliography
Selected Honors and Publications