FORUM
NORMAN MANEA: About clowns: The Dictator and The Artist
The title essay of the book in which the author - an emigrant from the communist Romania analyses the dependences and mutual entanglements among art and totalitarian authority.
"... repression was our tangible present, the air we breathed every day, the atmosphere in every office and restaurant. The children laughed at the tyrant and couldn't understand why all the adults around them let him gain so much power over them. This too is a paradox characteristic of this little clown who differs from Hitler or Stalin in that children find him merely ridiculous."
Exile towards Freedom. Krzysztof Czyżewski talks to Norman Manea
Norman Manea - a writer. A Jew born in Romania, emigrated to West Berlin in 1986 and has lived in the USA since 1988. He speaks about his childhood in Bucovina, the deportation to Transinistria (Ukraine), about anti-Semitism, emigration, and the life in New York.
Recollection of the World. Aleksandra Hnatiuk and Bogumiła Berdychowska talk to Ihor KaŁyniec.
The conversation with one of the most eminent modern Ukrainian poets. Kałyneć recollects the post-war Galicia, his university studies in Lviv and the persecution of men of letters, including his stay in Soviet work camp in Siberia.
BOGUSŁAW BAKUŁA: Keys to Kiev
The reporter's account of the stay in Kiev.
"I was slowly approached by the world of Kiev, the city still suspended in political vacuum, dramatically fighting for its identity, built on the hills like Rome, having a river more beautiful than the one Lisbon has, and the metaphysical perspective and ancient history that neither Warsaw, nor Prague has."
TARAS WOZNIAK: From the problems of self-identification of Ukraine and Europe
The question of identity is not only the question of ethnic self-identification, but also of the cultural, religious, political and economic orientation. In case of the states of the former Soviet bloc, Ukraine included, the answer to this difficult question seems the priority.

THE LITERARY CORNER
Poems by: BOHDAN ANTONYCZ, an eminent poet in the Ukrainian language, born in Nowica in the Łemkowszczyzna region; JANUSZ SZUBER, awarded with the first prize of the Foundation of Culture; ANTONI MATUSZKIEWICZ, born in Lviv, the author of some collections of poems and radio-plays; NATHAN ZACH, a Jewish poet, editor and publisher; LEA GOLDBERG, a Jewish poe-tess, born in Królewiec and living in Palestine since 1935; JEHUDA AMICHAJ, a Jewish poet and language expert
Prose: NORMAN MANEA: Short stories: Pullover, Balls of Faded Wool
Two short stories from the collection "October, Eight o'Clock".
Literary Critics: AGNIESZKA KORNIEJENKO: Short History of Ukrainian Modernism
The discussion about modernism, started by the manifesto by Mykoła Woron in 1901, seems to be present in the Ukrainian literary life until today.
In Ukraine, modernism was initially identified with Europeanism, with liberating an artist from the patriotic duty of testifying the national identity. And for that reason it was treated as an anti-national factor.
The article presents the evolution of the concept in literature.
JURIJ ANDRUCHOWYCZ: The Metaphysics of a "different Lviv". About the city in the poems of Bohdan I. Antonycz. Transl. By Katarzyna Kotyńska
"Those two co-ordinates - the city of Lviv (with the features of heaven and hell taken together, typical only of that city) and the poet Antonycz (who lived and died in that city) have for a long time - until today? - been demarcating my way of perceiving the world. That Lviv and that Antonycz - what an uncommon co-incidence, what a sign? They could have missed each other in our world, full of wasted opportunities. Antonycz could have settled down in Vienna, Prague, or, which is more likely, in Cracow. He could also have just stayed there, at home, among the Łemkowszczyzna forests, surrounded with the fragrances of trees and clay."
The author writes about the ties of the Łemkowszczyzna poet with Lviv and about his own literary fascinations.
WOŁODYMIR JESZKILEW: The Knight before the Priest. A fairy tale about Jurij Andruchowycz. Transl. by Ola Hnatiuk
Jurij Andruchowycz - an Ukrainian poet, prose writer, co-originator of the Bu-Ba-Bu (Burleska-Bałahan-Bufonada - Burlesque-Disorder-Buffoonery) group of poets.
PIOTR KRUPIŃSKI: Rose of Nothingness: About "the Magnetic point" of Ryszard Krynicki
A literary criticism essay concentrated on the idea of nothingness in the creative work of the Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki. The title "rose of nothingness" comes from the poem by Paul Celan.

THEATRE STUDIO
ŁEŚ KURBAS: From the diary of a theatre director. Transl. by Bruno Chojak
Łeś Kurbas, the legend of the Ukrainian vanguard theatre (1887-1937), was writing the diary of a theatre director since 1920. The fragments selected and translated by Bruno Chojak.
ŁEŚ KURBAS: Theatre Letter
A letter to the non-existent "Lady Lilla" was an important utterance in the ever-reviving discussion about the crisis in the theatre.
ŁEŚ KURBAS: On the Edge (About The Young Theatre)
The Young Theatre was created in opposition to the traditional Ukrainian theatre. Its creators decided to break up with the fossilized theatrical form, to accept what is "born out of the direct and sincere feeling of the world."
ŁEŚ KURBAS: The Manifesto of the Young Theatre (To the Viewers)
The programmatic text which was initially delivered before the performances of the Young Theatre by Kurbas disguised as Pierrot.
BRUNO CHOJAK: Łeś Kurbas in Poland and in Ukraine
The article presents the course of research connected with the creative work of Kurbas and its popularisation, mostly by the Wrocław Centre of Jerzy Grotowski's Creative Work Research.

CIRCLES OF INITIATION
KRZYSZTOF CZYŻEWSKI: Sacrum, Fascism, Eliade
"How is it that, while defending our own identity, we situate ourselves antipolarly towards those who defend the human rights? Why does noble endeavour, born out of authentic spiritual necessity, which does not find a place for itself in the Enlightenment philosophy of life, becomes perverted on the way which runs - as an old carpenter used to say - "to the right form God"?
The analysis of the attitude and philosophy of life of one of the most famous Rumanian intellectuals, Mircea Eliade, in the context of fascist and anti-Semitic tendencies in the XX-th century Europe."
MIHAIL SEBASTIAN: The Journals 1935-1944. Transl. by Jerzy Kotliński
Some fragments of the journals by a Jewish writer from Romania, devoted to the problem of Romania's participation in Holocaust, the publication of which provoked a vivid discussion.
"You need some energy, some determination to write a diary, at least at the beginning, before it becomes a habit, before you find a proper tone. To cut the long story short, there is something unnatural in the fact itself of writing a personal diary. In no other case does writing seem to me more insincere. Here you miss the feeling that the language is after all the means of communication, you miss the feeling of urgent necessity. (...) There is a sort of a awkward difficulty in the fact that you write "for yourself". Writing, if it does not help to communicate with someone (by a letter, an article or a book) seems to me, at least at the beginning, something absurd and devoid of intimacy."

THE DISPLAY-PUBLICATIONS
This is the presentation of books, publishing series and CDs concerning the culture and problems of the Ukrainian culture. There are discussions of recent publications: albums, books, periodicals and musical recordings published in Poland and abroad, devoted to the problems of the Ukrainian and Central-Eastern Europe culture devoted to the problems of the culture of Ukraine and Central-Eastern Europe.