PARANDOWSKI Jan - Alchemy of the word. Circ. Jan Młodożeniec

Author: PARANDOWSKI Jan

Title: Alchemy of words

• Place of publication: Warsaw
• Year of publication: 1965
• Publisher: Czytelnik
• Number of pages: 333, [2].
• Illustrations, maps: mir. outside text 1
• Size: 20 cm
• Binding: hardback publisher's cloth with wrapper
• Condition: good, previous owner's signature

Description:

Fourth edition expanded. The wrapper and binding were designed by Jan Młodożeniec.

Erudite essay on the writing workshop of different eras. The author first conceived the idea of writing an essay in the interwar period in Vilnius, but began writing the work in 1941, during the German occupation, and continued after 1945 in Sweden (at the Royal Library in Stockholm), Norway and France (at the National Library of France in Paris). The work was finally completed in Ustka, a few months before its publication.

According to the author, the work, being neither a disguised memoir nor a textbook on the art of writing, is intended to introduce people interacting with the book to the process of its creation, to various matters of the writer's life and work that perhaps no one would think of when taking his work in hand[4]. This is a book devoted to various aspects of the formation of literature. Among other things, the author cites the biographies of established writers and the worries that their lives brought them, including complicated relations with publishers and sponsors. At the heart of the book is a message about the role of literature in human life, as well as the strenuousness with which it is created. In the pages of Alchemy of the Word, the elitism that characterizes the author's perspective comes to the fore. He disavows mass culture, fearing the shallowing of reading tastes on the one hand, and the excessive mercantilization of literature on the other.