“I am grateful for anxiety”: A reading of Leo Lipski’s recently discovered early works

Abstract

The article offers a tentative discussion of Leo Lipski’s early and yet unpublished works
which were discovered in the archives of the Józef Czechowicz Museum of Literature in
Lublin. One of them is a longer short story entitled O niepokoju i śmierci [On Anxiety and
Death], only parts of which have been published, and three unique ‘poems’, entitled Na wiosnę [In the Springtime], Do papieru [For Paper] and Na pożegnanie dziewczyny [On a Farewell to a Girl]. The authors of the article introduce the recently discovered texts from the
editorial perspective and discuss both the historical and biographical context in which they
were created. Moreover, the authors offer an interpretation of these works and attempt to situate them in the context of Lipski’s pre-war writing. They also throw into relief the relations between Lipski’s early works and his novel Niespokojni [The Unsettled]. The article is published with the works under discussion, which are preceded by a brief editorial commentary.