An incomprehensible experiment or a social intervention? Conceptualizing the avant-garde in Lviv’s “Sygnały”

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of comments on poetic avant-garde that had appeard in Sygnały (Signals Magazine), published 1933–1939 in Lwów. The end of the 1930s was the moment of evaluation of the avant-garde tradition, and the voices resounding in the pages of Sygnały emphasized the need to relate avant-garde programs and poetic productions to the vision of socially-engaged literature. The aim of the article is to both – show and comment on the idioms of writing about the avant-garde. The paper reveals the meanings assigned to the concept of ‘avant-garde’ and the strategy of combining/separating formal poetry (with which the avant-garde was identified) with engaged poetry. The article takes a polemical approach to post-war opinions about Sygnały as an environment that clearly distanced itself from avant-garde formalism and experiment, which denied any connection with social consciousness. The statements from the Lviv’s magazine are presented in the article against the background of revaluations formulated in the then Soviet criticism, which allows us to illuminate ways of introducing issues of socialist real­ism into the critical discourse as a tendency opposed to avant-garde formalism, but in Sygnały shown in a connection with revisions (not: negations) of avant-garde poetics that is not obvious today.