Axiological Centre and Aesthetic Periphery in Henryk Bereza’s Literary Criticism

The text examines various insights found in the reception of Henryk Bereza’s criticism. Among other things, his commentators emphasised the coherent and essentially invariable system of values on which his appraisals were founded. The article sets out to identify and elaborate on those hypotheses. The author attempts to determine which value was central to Bereza’s criticism and, based on the analysis of sample reviews and sketches, demonstrate how the aforementioned central value informed specific peripheral values and how it bore on Bereza’s critical verdicts. As it turns out, the fundamental value that the critic sought in prose was the subjective and unique truth of the subject, i.e. the artistic record of the writer’s existential experience. The assessment criteria that enabled Bereza to ascertain whether the truth of the subject had been captured in a given work were formulated a posteriori, as the critic intuitively verified the formal means chosen by authors for consistency with their goals.