Collected works and critical editions in Polish literature. Phenomenon’s outline

Abstract

The article is an attempt to outline the phenomenon of collected works of Polish fiction which have appeared in the last 150 years. The aim of the text is to exemplify the most important editions and to characterize their critical apparatus, which at the further stage of research may become a basis for detailed considerations. First of all, the author discusses completed editions of Polish writers of the second half of the 19^th and 20^th century, which appeared in the last one hundred and fifty years (1870–2020). The author shows the evolution of the phenomenon and outlines when the contemporary model of opera omnia edition emerged, starting from Roman Pilat’s text from 1884 and ending with the proposals of Konrad Górski, Zbigniew Goliński, Jan Trzynadlowski and Roman Loth from the second half of the 20^th century. In view of the small number of theoretical studies on collected works, the article has the character of a prolegomenon of the phenomenon, and constitutes a proposal of issues that could become the subject of separate considerations. Among the most important questions that have been posed are: when can a given edition be called critical? Is it at all possible in the light of the specificity of the writing of 19^th and 20^th century authors? How does the theory of editing relate to publishing practice?