Mount Everest 1924 di Jalu Kurek

The article is devoted to the non-fiction novel by Jalu Kurek Mount Everest 1924 published in 1933. We argue against the point of view expressed by critics who claimed that this book has to be seen only as a kind of “intermezzo” in the writer’s career. The book’s various aspects are connected with contemporary market trends, formal experiments, specific topics (the passion for climbing and the position taken in the discussion about the future of Alpinism) and ideological contexts (the fundamental aporias of modernism: faith in progress and in the post-Nietzschean new man versus existential anxiety of an attentive observer of the world). All this makes it an important element of the artistic journey of this Cracovian poet and prose writer.