„Żyjemy, walcząc z przyrodą”. Pierwsza awangarda i antropocen

This paper analyses the work of authors associated with Awangarda Krakowska (in Polish: ‘Vanguard of Kraków’), discussing it in terms of contemporary discussions on the Anthropocene. The activity of this most radical formation in Polish modern literature coincided with the pinnacle of industrial progress. The members of the movement were staunch supporters of the latter which they tended to describe in terms of fossil fuels industry and the taming or transformation of natural environment. Adopting Peiper’s formula of three ‘M’s’ (Megalopolis, Mass, Machine), their attitude to nature is here discussed through three ‘E’s’: Enthusiasm, Exploitation, and Ecology. The former two were prevalent concepts in the interwar period and were derived from the philosophical discourse of modernity, gaining further focus in the avant-garde aesthetics and its slogans of human rivalry with nature. The resulting texts presented the intense process of transforming reality as an epic of forging a new order and introducing creative orderly patterns into the chaotic world of nature. This perspective tends to gradually disappear in the post-war texts, as the members of the avant-garde movement realised the negative consequences of the processes they once praised. Their texts reveal symptoms of ecological awareness and first suggestions that human attitude towards nature should be redefined.