Walizka Tuwima. Rzecz o Tuwimie i o Liberaturze

The article explores the connection between Julian Tuwim’s oeuvre and the concept of liberature. Coined by Zenon Fajfer in the 1990s, the term liberature accentuates the visual and spatial aspects of a literary text and highlights the fact that the meaning of a text depends on its material form. The author reconstructs Tuwim’s approach to formal experimentation related to the spatial and visual aspects of a text. To this aim, he analyses Pegaz dęba (written before 1939, first published in 1950, and republished in 2008), whose manuscript survived the war in a suitcase buried close to Tuwim’s house. The book is a collection and study of various genres and other forms of artistic expression which showed liberary features long before the term was coined. Ranocchi argues that although Tuwim treated what is now called liberature as an insignificant and marginal curiosity, he nevertheless defined it as an area of interest for both literary historians and writers. Thus, Pegaz dęba can be seen as the first Polish attempt to systematize the literary works that have more recently been labelled as liberature and as such won critical acclaim.