The memory of Intermarium culture in Jerzy Stempowskis ‘Rubis d’Orient’

This reading of Jerzy Stempowski’s essay ‘Rubis d’Orient’ (published in 1954 under the pseudonym Paweł Hostowiec) is based on the assumption that his work can be divided into two phases, the Appolonian and the Dionysian. While the essay ‘In the Dniester river valley’, with its idealized world of a timeless idyll, seems to be the most salient manifestation of the Appolonian phase, ‘Rubis d’Orient’ marks Stempowski’s turn towards temporality and historical time. The intrusion of tragedy and Dionysian motifs is accompanied by a change of style and structure, increasingly complex and metaphoric. This transition, the article argues, is nowhere clearer than in ‘Rubis d’Orient’, which, moreover, reads like an art manifesto. This, in turn, puts Stempowski's subsequent essays and his catastrophist views in a new perspective.