Żywa nauka Franciszka Siedleckiego

The article examines the work of an eminent Polish literary scholar, structuralist, versologist, essayist, and poet Franciszek Siedlecki, who died prematurely in 1942. The author claims that Siedlecki’s oeuvre taken only as a whole, unseparated into scientific studies, essays, poems, and letters—can be considered as a model of the modern literary theory scholar’s life and work. This is because of Siedlecki’s being “betwixt and between” in two meanings: literature and literary studies, and between science and politics, where both meanings are dependent on each other. The “double-handed” writing, proper for the modern literary theory studies, as the author argues, apparently can and does have a clear political and social dimension. The analysis takes into account mainly the less known or even unknown texts by Siedlecki—essays published in prewar periodicals as well as his letters found in the archives in Warsaw, Vilnius, and New York—and treats them as counter-narratives that splinter the widely accepted beliefs about both Siedlecki’s legacy and the origins of Polish structuralism, undermining the allegedly autonomical status of the latter. Seen this way, Siedlecki also today is becoming a surprisingly interesting scholar and writer.