Women, Cats, the Moon. About Leo Lipski’s Prose

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present images of women in Leo Lipski’s modern emigration prose (in the works Niespokojni [Anxious] and Piotruś [Peter]). These representations are analysed in the context of patterns distributed by patriarchal culture (femmes fatales), with particular emphasis on aesthetic conventions produced in early modernity. Lipski references conventional imagery of the misogynised male-centric discourse, encoding gender differences using stereotypical attributes and associations such as lunar and animalistic topics. On the other hand, however, in these novels there is a clear erosion of schematic imagery, created on the basis of misogynist discourse, the writer intercepts and inverts modernist clichés, creating from them a complex symbolic structure, the specificity of which in many respects differs from that of early modernist literature. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Lipski is not so much trying to restore the planes of the male-female understanding in his prose as he is questioning them, and instead proposes, as a (self)therapeutic form, the possibility of paradoxical fulfilment of love through the story, which problematises and reveals the reasons for the fiasco of feelings, as well as points to the crevices of authenticity opening up in the reality of the literary game, where the world of eroticism is an important element.