International Conference on Poetics

In the second half of August of last year, the first international conference on poetics was held in Warsaw, on the initiative of the Institute for Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, in which literary scholars, linguists and folklorists from the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, the United States, England, France, the Netherlands, and Israel took part. The conference program included reports by prominent Soviet scholars, academicians and professors V. V. Vinogradov, A. I. Efimov, N. I. Zhinkin, and D. S. Likhachev, but only the latter two took part in the conference. Polish literary scholars and linguists, led by the organizers of the conference S. Zhulkowski, M. R. Mayenova, and K. Vika, took part with reports from all areas of poetics. The world-famous Polish linguist Prof. J. Kurilovich was very active in the work of the conference. The largest was the US delegation, led by the prominent linguist and Slavicist Prof. R. Jacobson, who took part in the discussions on most of the reports. Among the participants in the conference were the well-known Czech Slavicist and Bulgarianist Prof. K. Horalek, the Romanian academician-literary critic T. Vianu, the German Slavicist and folklorist, professor at the University of Jena H. Peukert, the Dutch Slavicist, now professor in California Schonefeld, and many others. Bulgaria was represented by Petar Dinekov, Lyubomir Andreychin, Stoyan Dzhudzhev and Emil Georgiev. Over the course of 10 days, in morning and afternoon sessions, 50 reports were read and about 120 speeches were made on them. The reports were grouped thematically, so that each day reports from a specific area were read and discussed. It is difficult to cover the problems raised at the conference in a report like ours. They were truly numerous and diverse and affected all areas of poetics, as well as being connected to related areas. A suitable atmosphere was created for productive scientific work. The method of persuasion and arguments prevailed. Only rarely did a sharp polemical tone sound, revealing fundamental worldview contradictions and different understandings of the issues raised. Since the term "poetics" is not particularly popular in our country, and some even consider it outdated, including the content of this discipline in the theory of literature, it is not uninteresting for our reader to clarify the very concept and the content of this branch of literary studies. The subject matter of the reports that we outline in our report clarifies this quite fully. The German professor H. Peukert (GDR) in his report formulated the concept of the term that he accepts: the study of the essence, genres and forms of poetic creativity and their inherent content and visual means, which, through comparative observation of individual works, leads to the definition of typological features and genre regularities.