“Do Not Throw Down the Glove Before Me, or You Shall Be Cold”. The Aphorisms of Karol Irzykowski

Abstract

The article discusses Karol Irzykowski as an aphorist, focusing on the discord between the critic’s intensive practice of the aphorism and his scathing condemnation of the form of the aphorism, which in his opinion was an instance of simplified, apodictic thinking. The aim of the article is to attempt to explain what justifies the frequent use of the aphorism by a writer who did not appreciate this device; what shape Irzykowski’s aphorisms took against the background of the tradition of the genre; and, finally, what is their function in his writing and what they prove. Irzykowski’s skeptical attitude to this form of statement stems from his epistemological beliefs and provides both a basis for his modifications of the genre and the keystone of cycles of intertextually related aphorisms which the present author has identified in dispersed yet thematically connected pieces by this critic.