Ogień i nóż – pirofityczna twórczość Erny Rosenstein

ABSTRACT. This article aims to demonstrate the meaning is attached to fire in Erna Rosenstein’s poetry and art. Based on the pioneering analyses by Dorota Jarecka, I suggest that the particularly intense presence of fire in the artist's oil paintings, assemblages and poems is driven by the need to create a constellation of random objects, myths and autobiographical material centered on the experience of witnessing her parents' deaths in 1942. By analyzing various approaches to fire, I show that Rosenstein searches for a form of invigorating and evolving destruction in her poetry (which I define as “pyrophytic art”) which would enable her to fantasize about a world after a catastrophe, a world without human life. In this approach, poetry emerges as an extension of the ideas presented in her art. Taking at times narrative, fairy-tale or mythographic forms, poetry defines Rosenstein’s artistic idiolect in a more individual way than art could, allowing the artist's voice, her own speaking self, to be emphasized and dynamized.