Poeticisation of prose in Mariusz Wilk’s Wilczy notes
Wilczy notes [Wolf’s Notebook or Wilk’s Notebook] 1998 is a post-Soviet jungle book — prose dealing with the Russian provinces made familiar by Wilk. In terms of its genre, it is a hypersilva rerum or ultra-hybrid: essay-cum-diary-article-travelogue-reportage-notebook. The author of the article tries to demonstrate that what happens in this genological cornucopia is interference of not only literary genres, but also of literary forms: poetry and prose. Poeticisation means occasional introduction into a non-poetic text of a characteristic feature of lyrical poetry: stylistic overorganisation on the lexical, syntactical and sonic levels to an extent sufficient to draw attention to linguistic signs. The author discusses the unusual lexical devices of the “Russian writer writing in Polish” paroxysms of “isms”: Russianisms, OCSisms, “Solovetsisms,” archaisms, vulgarisms, manifestations of phonetic instrumentation and rhythmicisation etymological figures, assonances, exact inner rhymes, trochaic series, cretics, Wilk’s stylistic tropes aphoristic and Homer-style comparisons, metaphors based on unconventional combinations of the subject and the predicate. The procession of lyrical devices ends with an “ut pictura poesis” kind of poeticisation e.g. aestheticisation of nature by means of direct references to the art of painting, grammatical promotion of colours by turning them into nouns and verbs and metaliterary “footnotes to writing.”