Szymborska e Lem

Abstract

After recalling some biographical data and events that brought the fates of Wislawa Szymborska and Stanislaw Lem closer together since just after the II World War, the article aims to show the kinship of views on some fundamental issues of the two great writers, who were almost the same age. Sometimes such convergences even seem to lead to forms of intertextual relationships between the otherwise very different works of the two writers of “Cracow import”. Particular attention is paid here to some “parallels” between certain concepts expressed by Lem in Summa technologiae and Szymborska’s “ontological” poems, with particular reference to the themes of “chance”, “individual identity”, “evolution” and a shared suspicion towards metaphysics and the general non-anthropocentrism of their work, as well as the importance of rationalism and irony as keys to reading the world.