Tadeusz Różewicz and Tadeusz Borowski: The Origin of a Parallel

Summary It is an entrenched habit among the critics to connect the early poetry of Tadeusz Różewicz and Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories. However, this stereotype can be backed by no good proof either in the poems Różewicz wrote in the first years after the war or in their reception. The parallel Różewicz-Borowski was put out into the world by Jan Błoński in his Szkic portretu poety współczesnego [A portrait sketch of a contemporary poet] (1956); at that time the parallel became a handy tool in the battle with Socialist Realist critics and their evaluations of Różewicz’s poetry. The matching of the two authors was made all the more plausible by Różewicz’s comeback during the Polish Thaw. It was manifested not only in a spate of new poems but also in his decisions about the choice of poems representing the postwar phase for publications like Poezje zebrane [Collected Poems] (1957). In essence, the links between Różewicz and Borowski are intertextual. Różewicz must have been familiar with Borowski’s Auschwitz stories, which came as a shock to their first readers, and he would most certainly have read Rudolf Reder’s account of the extermination camp at Bełżec camp. Those two books helped to shape Różewicz’s experience of war that can found in his work.