In a similar vein, Stanisław Jaworski – the author of a selection of poems by avantgarde poets Odpowiem ci przestrzenią [I Will Answer You with Space] – set apart mountaineering poetry. The researcher considered the first mountaineering poems to be the works of Jan Alfred Szczepański, who was active as a poet alongside Julian Przyboś and Jan Brzękowski, and later became an outstanding mountaineer, editor of the magazine Taternik [Tatra Climber], and an organiser and activist of mountaineering movement in Poland. Mountaineering in Szczepański’s poetry is “conceived of as a source of ‘joy of life, strength enchanted in beauty’, as an arena of clashes, where ‘with a frail climb’ one breaks ‘the resistance of the element’” (Jaworski 1976: 87).
When Polish climbers from the Tatra Mountains set off for the high mountains (Alps, Himalayas), mountaineering literature began to develop alongside literature related to tourism in the Tatra Mountains. In a paper delivered in 1978, on the margins of a consideration of how mountaineering literature exists, Kolbuszewski writes about “the socalled” and “broadly defined” mountain literature (Kolbuszewski 1981:63) [8]:
Therefore mountaineering literature is a special variety of the socalled mountain literature, special in the sense that it concerns the most specialised forms of human conquering activity in the mountains, and an important distinguishing criterion for it is the respect of professional, specialised elements of knowledge of how man conquers mountains. In this sense, mountaineering literature, as opposed to mountain literature in the broadest sense, must be regarded as an effect of the professionalisation of the environment of mountain people, with the exception, however, that what we have in mind here is fine literature, and not specialised professional – “technical” literature (mountaineering manuals, climbing guides, etc.). (Kolbuszewski 1981: 55).
[8] Kolbuszewski’s findings are referred to by Pacukiewicz (2010a: 218).