Reversals and partings. Over the manuscripts for Włodzimierz Odojewski’s Nie można cię zostawić samego o zmierzchu and Jeżeli jeszcze kiedyś będę… (from the writer’s Poznań archive)

Abstract

The study retraces and investigates Włodzimierz Odojewski’s (1930–2016) process of writing two short stories between 1976 and 1993 by interrogating the manuscripts (handwritten and typed) from the writer’s personal archive, maintained by the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. To document the genesis of the stories, the author draws on analytical methods proposed by French text geneticists (Pierre-Marc De Biasi, Jean Bellemin-Noël) and American scholar John Bryant (author of the fluid text concept). The investigation is focused on selected clusters of revisions made in Odojewski’s manuscripts – edits made to the title and the opening paragraphs, alongside various deletions, corrections, and additions. The investigation is premised on the argument that in the course of a long creative act, writers typically strive for compositions that most precisely reflect the nuances of their characters’ mental states and the settings of their stories. As performed by Odojewski, the creative act serves as an example of the inherent volatility of writing, which ultimately produces highly fluid characters.