Czytanie Pilcha w sensie ścisłym. O wpływie autotematyzmu na powstanie persony medialnej Jerzego Pilcha

Reading Pilch in the strict sense. About the influence of self-referentiality on the formation of the public persona of Jerzy Pilch The essential focus of this article is the issue of the “trap of self-referentiality” that Jerzy Pilch and his audience fell into. The aim of the article is to trace Pilch’s autobiographical and self-referentiality comments and examine how they affected the reception of his image, as well as the interpretation of his persona. The analysis of various commentaries allows the author to carefully trace the intricacies of the public persona created by Jerzy Pilch, a persona that became for him both a popularizing trademark and a burden for a sensitive man. Hanik shows that Pilch destined himself to such a fate, over the years meticulously creating the image, that he maintained in interviews, numerous speeches and numerous autobiographical novels. This earned him both a crowd of loyal fans and a group of harsh critics. The author sketches Pilch’s image emerging from these statements in order to retrace where it was disturbed, and to analyze the statements, reviews and comments on his persona that reinforced this image or undermined its authenticity. Finally, the article shows that the creation of one of the first such distinctive media personas in the Polish literary market, was at the same time the creation of one of Pilch’s characters, one of the most difficult to interpret.