Avant-garde in earnest! Stern’s biographical experiments with Apollinaire

Abstract

The article is devoted to a genealogical investigation, undertaken by Anatol Stern, in his attempt to reconstruct the origin story of Guillaume Apollinaire. The effect of his research is a book entitled Dom Apollinaire’a. Rzecz o polskości i rodzinie poety, published in 1973, which is a collection of essays, previously published in Polish and European journals, prepared for publication after the author’s death by his wife, Alicja Stern. The subject of analyses in the paper are not only the published texts but first and foremost an extensive archival collection of materials devoted to Apollinaire, collected by Stern, as well as different forms of literary practices, within which Stern carried out artistic biographical modifications of his findings concerning the author of Alcools. The theoretical perspective adopted for the analysis a wide range of auto/biographical texts here is the concept of life writing. In the course of the study the value of Alicja Stern’s commentary, found in her unpublished memoir, comes centre stage, as it indicates the possibility of a “pseudo-auto-biographical” reading of some of Stern’s texts devoted to Apollinaire. This line of interpretation – exposing the situation of “the other” – opens up the possibility of looking for a ”Maroon-like subject” and places in which Stern’s own situation of “the other” along with various forms of masking his own “interrupted”, “unstable” identity.