Polish Literature

The book is the first attempt to comprehensively examine and describe the daily writing practices of a Polish psychologist Julian Ochorowicz (1850–1917). More than one hundred notebooks of the scientist, now stored in the archives of the library of the Ossoliński Institute in Wrocław, constitute an extraordinary and so far unexplored source of knowledge about his intimate writing practices. The author proves that the method of introspection, crucial for the psychologist and understood as constantly repeated turning towards oneself, made it possible for Ochorowicz to choose his own research path and, consequently, to abandon the well-trodden paths of scientific development.

This article analyzes how the Poles and Jews who disappeared from the western Ukrainian city of L’viv as a result of the Second World War are remembered in the city today. It examines a range of commemorative practices, from monuments and museums to themed cafes and literature, and analyzes how these practices interact to produce competing mnemonic narratives. In this respect, the article argues for an understanding of the city as a complex text consisting of a diverse range of mutually interdependent mnemonic media produced by a range of actors. The article focuses in particular on the ways in which Ukrainian nationalist narratives interact with the memory of the city’s “lost others.” The article also seeks to understand L’viv’s memory culture through comparison with a range of Polish cities that have faced similar problems with commemorating vanished communities, but have witnessed a deeper recognition of these communities than has been the case in L’viv. The article proposes reasons for the divergences between the memory cultures of L’viv and that found in Polish cities, and attempts to outline the gradual processes by which L’viv’s Polish and Jewish pasts might become more widely integrated into the city’s memory culture.

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/V4JAXTWUYV9PHYMWSZIP/full?target=10.1080/00085006.2019.1708530

This article raises the question of the continuity of national traditions of scholarly editing (from print to digital), and points to the possibility of overcoming the “inertia of tradition.” It first considers the transition of the editing and publishing of literature in Slavic countries from amateur activities based on subjective principles to scholarly editing. The author pays particular attention to the evolution of the editor’s role, as well as to opportunities for researchers, editors, and publishers in the context of digitizing the humanities. The second part of this article focuses on pioneering attempts at digital representations of Slavic literatures, their problems, and achievements. The author concludes with some observations concerning the role played by editions of authors regarded as classics in the evolution of national identities in Slavic countries. He argues that significant achievements in print editing do not guarantee success in digital editing, nor do relatively modest achievements and limited possibilities in print editing preclude success in the digital representations of national literatures. Most examples, observations, and generalizations refer to the history of scholarly editing of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian literatures. However, speaking about contemporary editing, the author also addresses the experience of scholars from Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, and Anglo-American academia.

The railway is often characterised as one of the crucial innovations of the nineteenth century which transformed patterns of space and time, exposed people to the mechanical power of the industrial revolution, led to the formation of a panoramic perception of the world, and changed the economic circulation. In China, the new technology was adopted later than in Europe and America, and its development took place in a semi-colonial context. As such, the railway experience took on a different dimension there. Based on a corpus of Polish and Serbian travel writings about China, this article examines how travellers represented railways in the Middle Kingdom. Five main topics are discussed: (1) the railway as an icon of modernity; (2) the railway as a “purely European invention”; (3) Polish and Serbian patriotism as linked to the Chinese Eastern Railway; (4) the train as a space of interactions; (5) panoramic visions of China.

Artysty (nie)łatwe początki... Z dziejów recepcji przedwojennej twórczości Adolfa Rudnickiego 22 stycznia 1909 roku w domu ortodoksyjnych Żydów Izaaka i Nechy Hirschhornów na świat przyszło ich siódme dziecko-mały Aron-chłopiec, który dwadzieścia jeden lat później, w roku 1930 opublikować miał na łamach "Kuriera Porannego" swój pierwszy utwór-nowelę Śmierć operatora, a dwa lata później zadebiutował powieścią Szczury (1932). Młodzieniec karierę zawdzięczać miał samej Zofii Nałkowskiej, która najbardziej się lubowała (…) w wywąchiwaniu talentu, w wyszukiwaniu wartości, choćby takich co to nie dojrzysz bez lupy. Przynoszono jej skrypt nikomu nie znanego poety, a po trzech dniach, już dyskutowano o nim na jej herbatce. (…) nic dziwnego, że młodzież garnęła się do niej (Gombrowicz 1996: 129). * * * W swoim artykule podejmuję próbę odtwarzania przedwojennych głosów krytyków literackich na temat wydanych wówczas utworów Adolfa Rudnickiego. Na podstawie blisko czterdziestu recenzji powstał możliwie szeroki i przekrojowy obraz tego, jak twórczość pisarza odczytywana i oceniana była w interesującym mnie okresie. Moim celem było skonfrontowanie głosów badaczy, zdaniem których Rudnicki już od momentu swojego literackiego debiutu stał się ulubieńcem krytyki, z tekstami źródłowymi, a więc oryginalnymi recenzjami publikowanymi na łamach prasy przedwojennej 1. Dokonana przeze mnie kwerenda pozwoliła poddać w wątpliwość powielaną, właściwie bez żadnego wyjątku, tezę, jakoby Rudnicki cieszył się niezwykłą przychylnością recenzentów. Co więcej, moje ustalenia wskazują na sytuację zgoła odwrotną, a tym samym pozwalają spojrzeć na okres przypadający 1 Ze względu na chęć jak najwierniejszego odwzorowania przedwojennych reakcji na twórczości Adolfa Rudnickiego wszystkie cytowane źródła podaję w ich oryginalnej formie, z zachowaniem zarówno przedwojennej orografii, jak i interpunkcji.

The paper analyzes the Polish literary discourse on the former Habsburg province of Galicia, developing after the restoration of Poland’s independence (1918) and the Polish victory in the Polish-Ukrainian War of Eastern Galicia (1918–1919). Before WWI, especially before the epoch of Galician autonomy (1867–1914), the prevailing discourse on the province was imbued by the idea of multi- and transnationalism grounded upon the Habsburg political culture. After the war, when Galicia became a part of the reborn Poland, the discourse pertaining to the region underwent a fundamental change. In the interwar Polish literature, the idea of multi- and transnational Galicia was a subject of specific transfers: sometimes in a continuative, usually, however, in a deconstructive version. Namely, it was disassembled and its components, referring to a revised political context, were ideologically used to strengthen the representation of reality from the exclusive, Polish point of view. The paper focuses on literary representations of the Polish-Ukrainian War of Eastern Galicia. It discusses the stages of the aforementioned disassemblement, from the idea of Polish-Ruthenian “brotherhood” to the vision of Polish-Polish brotherhood, i.e. the homogenous Polish nation, from which the Others (Ukrainians, Jews and Austrians), depicted as enemies, were excluded with no exception. Such a vision prevailed in the Polish literature up until 1939; it has also had its continuations nowadays.

AWARDS:

2011 AQUILA POLONICA ARTICLE PRIZE

The biennial prize, funded by Aquila Polonica Publishing, is awarded by the Polish Studies Association to the author of "the best article written in English during the previous two years on any aspect of Polish studies."

FROM THE AWARD COMMITTEE:

Romanska’s article "succeeds taking a relatively difficult and opaque subject, Grotowski’s 1962 re-staging of Wyspiański’s Akropolis against the background of Auschwitz, both accessible and rewarding for readers who are not specialists in Polish theatre. While Romanska’s analysis remains grounded in theatre, and her conclusion is ultimately about theatrical production, she raises many questions about history, memory, and national mythology that most readers will want to learn more about. What is particularly impressive is the scope of the article, which ranges over the entire twentieth century. [...] Romanska’s work makes a convincing argument that we need to be paying more attention to theatre in Poland."

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2010 GERALD KAHAN SCHOLAR'S PRIZE

Awarded by the American Society for Theatre Research, for “best essay written and published in English in a refereed scholarly journal.” The winning essay is judged as "displaying originality in the broad field of theatre and performance, exhibiting critical rigor, showing an acquaintance with related research in theatre and performance, and promising future professional development in the field.”

FROM THE AWARD COMMITTEE:

Romanska’s essay offers“an excellent unpacking of both Stanislaw Wyspianski’s 1904 drama, Akropolis, and its production history. Her essay made use of extensive sources to tell a complicated story-layered text, performance, and context, paying attention to the original script as well as performances, especially, those directed by Jerzy Grotowski. The essay provides a missing, though essential, analysis of a production that is often cited, but perhaps rarely understood in its full context. The methods of historiography and documentary analysis are excellent and provide an instructive model for future performance scholarship.”"""

The main goal of the paper is to show how a discourse on the so-called ‘yellow race’ functioned in the Polish and Serbian travel writing from the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century. An analysis of the semantics of the term ‘yellow race’ is also proffered.
Paying attention to Serbian and Polish authors can broaden our understanding of the imperial and racial dimension of representation of China. In the modern period, Poland and Serbia did not take part in exploitation of China; on the contrary, these countries themselves became objects of imperial domination. Nevertheless, when travellers from Poland or Serbia visited China, they often represented imperial institutions of foreign powers, e.g. as soldiers in the Russian army. Their outlook on the world was formed by intellectual trends born in Western Europe, like Darwinism. However, Poles and Serbs, being victims of imperialism themselves, were in a better position to understand the people of this East Asian nation. Therefore, we find an interesting ambivalence. Additionally, choosing Polish and Serbian travel writings also allows us to see whether representatives of a Catholic Slavic nation and an Orthodox Slavic nation had different attitude towards race issues

The paper considers Jan Potocki’s Manuscript Found in Saragossa in light of its intervention into nineteenth-century debates between what were called the ‘romantic’ and the ‘novelistic’ strains of literature. Potocki's novel is hard to place: a Gothic-Oriental hybrid, a travel narrative whose protagonist ultimately decides to stay, a fantastic story that never entirely clarifies its stance on the supernatural, a work that stages the clash between the exotic Orient and the rational West in a way that calls both categories into question. What makes his novel so interesting is the way that it strives to think past the dichotomies of East and West, realistic and marvelous, towards a more holistic understanding of the way that fiction triangulates between experience and imagination, and shapes a person's perception of reality. Amusingly, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa mirrors the shift happening in contemporary studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century fiction, a move away from a realism-based account of the novel and towards a more global approach that focuses on the development of the concept of fiction.

This article is devoted to the analysis of literary representations of Galicia in two discourses of the region: Ukrainian and Polish. They are discussed on the basis of essays by Yurii Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk. For both writers, the narrative of Galicia, understood concurrently as a bordering and post-bordering space, is the starting point for reflection on the epistemology and ontology of Polish-Ukrainian borderlands and Central Europe. A disparity emerges from the perspectives of the two writers which can be described by way of the opposition city/province. Andrukhovych explores the palimpsestic and heterotopic character of the Galician urban sphere, while Stasiuk focuses on the most peripheral regions. The meaning generated by that difference evokes disparate ideological concepts regarding both former Galicia and Central Europe.

Political Mechanisms of the Selection of Literary Texts for Foreign
Readers. Example of the Monthly Polska: czasopismo ilustrowane in
the 1950s

The monthly Polska: czasopismo ilustrowane [Poland: an illustrated
magazine] was created in 1954 as a tool to promote the achievements of the People’s Republic of Poland abroad. It was translated into English,
French, Spanish, German and Russian. The article presents an analysis
of the mechanisms of the selection of literary texts for the magazine in
the context of changes that took place in the country’s socio-political life
in the 1950s. The freedom of choice allowed to the publishers remained
within the limits defined by the authorities. The selection of texts depended, among others, on their authors’ state awards and on the plain fact that they had been formerly accepted for printing in the domestic market. The „thaw” in Poland led to changes in the way of selecting texts in the monthly. From 1956, the magazine began to present previously banned authors, who criticized the political system and wrote works in opposition to socialist realism. However, the propaganda goals of the authorities were not abandoned. The orientation of the contents was supposed to show the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland in a positive light, discredit the government in exile and emphasize the friendship between Poland and the USSR.

The article discusses, on the one hand, three stages of developing views about race and superiority of European civilization reflected in the second half of the 19th century in ag-gressive social-Darwinism of positivists, and on the other it confronts racial generalizations with nation-centered thinking, which played an extremely important role in identity discourse of the Poles. On the example of China and the Siberian-Chinese borderland, it can be noticed that perception of geography and the ethnic diversity in the world through the prism of great historiosophical and racial constructions is manifested in quite widespread adaptation of orientalizing language of the hegemon speaking about backwardness, lack of maturity for modernization and definite supremacy of Europe, while resistance to the oppression of the partitioners, and more broadly to the colonial policy of the European powers allows in Poland, contemptuously called Halb-Asien, like in the case of Indians and Boers, creating a kind of auto-colonial identification with the seemingly “exotic” nation.

If the East built the foundations of its culture on the ruthless subordination of man on to a higher power, the supernatural, then in the West it was the opposite, man was left to his own invention, which allowed for a broad, self-generated creativity … Vladimir Soloviev (cited by Kapuscinski with approval)

In the article, Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus” theory is employed to discuss Henryk Sienkiewicz’s hunting practices. Particular attention is devoted to the way the writer defines the concept of “masculinity” and its relationships with hunting skills. The author also points to the compensatory nature of this type of practices in the context of the nineteenth-century transformations of the social structure, the Polish political situation and the biography of the author of "With Fire and Sword".

This paper is devoted to the Polish translation of John Foxe’s famous Rerum in Ecclesia gestarum on Christian martyrs, authored by a Calvinist writer, printer and composer Cyprian Bazylik. His monumental Historyja o srogim prześladowaniu Kościoła Bożego (1567) was compiled from the works of John Foxe, Jean Crespin and Heinrich Pantaleon, supplemented with Jan van Utenhove’s account of the thrilling odyssey of the members of the London’s Foreign Church led by Jan Łaski. The author aimed at creation of a complete account of the persecuted Church throughout Europe, starting from John Wycliff to 1563. Historyja is the most significant witness of the impact of Foxe’s theological thought and ideas on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The article focuses on the English translations of Urszula Kochanowska, the
poem by Bolesław Leśmian, especially those created by Marian Polak-Chlabicz
and Krzysztof Bartnicki. The author of the article tries to achieve a critical
comparison between different translation strategies ventured to conquer the
difficulties associated with translating this verse which is strongly connected
with Polish culture and literature. The close-reading of the translations
is accompanied by short outline of Leśmian’s existence in English language
along with an attempt to answer the question whether translating his poetic
language is at all possible or is Leśmian’s work an evident proof (as many
critics say) of the phenomenon known as untranslatability.

The paper analyses child character identity change presented in contemporary Polish children’s novels about the Holocaust. Using the category of play described by scholars such as Erving Go man, George Eisen, and Jerzy Cieślikowski, it is shown that the change of a protagonist’s identity from Jewish to non-Jewish and vice versa is a sort of play containing a set of rules, practices, stakes, etc. As it is described, the child Jewish identity is something determined by the surrounding (mainly Nazi authority) and then something  fluid, not solid (as the protagonists mostly come from integrated Polish-Jewish backgrounds). Playing-out as coming out of normal life seems to be the only way to survive the terror of war and the Shoah. Identity fluidity is presented as a mechanism to show the protagonist as a universal character facing terrible events, which makes these novels readable for contemporary readers.

The article contains an analysis of the genealogy of 19th-century Polish research in the field of literary history. My inquiry contains a comparison between literary research in Germany and in Poland. From this point of view, literary history was an important factor in the process of building a modern nation. Furthermore, literary historians also played the role of indispensable authorities on the cultural past and present: in Germany as professors of universities, and in Poland during the partitions as intellectuals and writers.

This essay examines the role of translation in the redefinition of the relationship between authors and their respective national cultures, and in continuing discussions of gender, sexuality, migration and cultural identity in translation studies. The translation of Witold Gombrowicz’s novel Ferdydurke from Polish into Spanish by Cuban author Virgilio Piñera and a Translation Committee, not only calls into question the conventional dichotomy of author and translator, but also creates a transnational literary community which questions a number of assumptions about the history of translation in the West, its complicity both in the construction of literary canonicity and the maintenance of the educational institution.

Cet article examinera le rôle de la traduction littéraire
dans la redéfinition du rapport entre auteurs et leurs cultures nationales respectives, ainsi que dans les discussions de genre, sexualité, migration et identité culturelle en traductologie. La traduction du roman de Witold Gombrowicz, Ferdydurke, du polonais à l'espagnol par l’auteur cubain Virgilio Piñera et un Comité de traduction, ne remet pas seulement en cause la dichotomie conventionelle auteur/traducteur; elle engendre également une communauté littéraire transnationale qui interroge certaines préconceptions sur l’histoire de la traduction en Occident, et sa complicité tant dans la construction de la canonicité littéraire que le maintien de l’institution éducative.

The paper discusses the forgotten science fiction novel entitled Goście z Marsa by Władysław Satke with regard to “racial” ideology of the turn of the century. It primarily focuses on reconstruction of the ideological and intertextual background with particular reference to the 19th-century typologies of “races” and scientific theories based on them.Furthermore, the article addresses the issue of utopia and its limitations as a literary genre.

The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) survived wartime trauma and the devastation of his city and country, secret police scrutiny, postwar Communist oppression, and poverty, while suffering from severe chronic pulmonary disease and severe mood swings. His poetry, however, is filled with elegy, tenderness, faithfulness, wit, dignity, catharsis, and the renewal of tradition as a profound bow to everyday humanity. Herbert responded to trauma and loss by emphasizing that the poet lives  “in the treasure house of all misfortunes”, confronting the past and confront-ing lies, remembering individuals and particular details, writing from the ruins. He instructs us in an essential link between suffering and imagination.

"The aim of this paper is to introduce a new approach in translation studies which is an intercultural translation. Based on the methodology of Postcolonial Theory, the Manipulation School and Polysystem Theory, it allows for an analysis of texts originally written in the language of the target culture. Application of this
new framework is exemplified by diaries and letters of a Polish writer, Andrzej Bobkowski."

The article investigates writing strategies employed by Stanisław Grochowiak as an author of radio plays. Burzyńska analyses two of his works: Zaczarowana stacja (Enchanted railway station) and Perła (The Pearl) based on the novella by John Steinbeck. The article focuses on tracing differences between a theatrical play, a narrative text and a radio play and describes various methods that enabled Grochowiak to turn apparent restrictions of radio (e.g. „invisibility” of radio plays) into artistic advantages.

Streszczenie: Artykuł jest analizą procesu kreacji ("wymyślania") obrazu Łotwy w dwóch tekstach Marii Dąbrowskiej Dzienniku małej podróży (1927) oraz U północnych sąsiadów (1929)-będących zapisem tej samej podróży. Zjawisko "wymyślania" obcych kultur i społeczeństw przez pisarzy jest w swej strukturze podobne do tego, według Jamesa Clifforda, jak postępują etnologowie, badający inne kultury i społeczeństwa. Strategię "wymyślania" przez Dąbrowską obrazu jednego z krajów bałtyckich przedstawiono w kontekście notatek o Łotwie i Łotyszach, które pojawiają się na kartach dziennika prowadzonego przez pisarkę od roku 1914. Obok elementów typowych dla mikroanaliz społeczno-kulturowych w Dzienniku małej podróży i w książce U północnych sąsiadów pojawiają się tekstowe świadectwa głęboko emocjonalnego przeżywania krótkiego (trzydniowego) spotkania z kulturą Łotwy, co miało związek, po pierwsze, z osobistą sytuacją pisarki, po drugie, zaś, stanowi interesujący przykład utrwalania czy przepracowywania romantycznego wzorca Północy.

„Thinking Up” of Latvia by Maria Dąbrowska
This article attempts to show the process of a creation of a picture
of Latvia by Maria Dąbrowska. A phenomenon of „thinking up”, according to James Clifford, relates to the ways of description of a foreign culture similar to those used by ethnologists and writers. A core of the process of „thinking up” of a foreign culture includes both an ethnological information, socio-cultural analyses and also the evidences of an author’s emotions. The M. Dąbrowska’s works Dziennik małej podróży (1927) and
U północnych sąsiadów (1929) are a record of a summer travel through the three Baltic countries, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland in 1927. Moreover, M. Dąbrowska also updated what she wrote about this travel in her diary. Short diary notes were expanded on in Dziennik małej podróży and U północnych sąsiadów. Therefore, the process of „thinking up” of Latvia by the author includes particularly tokens of the emotional reactions primarily triggered by her first meeting with the culture and society of Latvia.

Stanislaw Lem, in his novel His Master’s Voice, uses the binary of empirical thought / mystical thought, along a Cold War west / east divide, to examine the nature of thought and model-making. The novel insists on the necessity of a new way of thinking.  Its self-reflexivity makes the book, and the narrator’s experience within it, the model of a new thought testing itself against the unknowably alien to prove its correctness.  The novel cannot present this new method, but only hints at an uncomfortable reconciliation between the two in the narrator.  It turns thought into a carousel of confusion.

This paper examines the Arabic origins of question and modal words in English, German, French, Latin, Greek, Russian, and Sanskrit from a lexical root theory perspective. The data consists of 21 terms like who, what, why, when, where, which, how; can/could, will/would, shall/should, may/might. All such words, the results exhibit, have true Arabic cognates, with the same or similar forms and meanings. Their different forms, however, are all found to be due to natural and plausible causes and different courses of linguistic change. Moreover, all the wh-question words in the so-called Indo-European languages developed from one form-viz., hu-in Germanic languages (English how, German wie, Gothic hvaiwa), qu-in Romance (Latin, French, Italian quis/que), Slavic (Russian kto), Sanskrit (kah), and Greek ti (tos), to which gender, number, and case endings were added, leading to different forms and different meanings like who, what, why, how, when, where in English. All such forms descended eventually from Arabic kaifa/kai 'how' via different routes of sound change, turning /k/ into /q/ in Latin and French, /h/ in English, and /t/ in Greek while /f/ became /w (u)/ in all. That is, Arabic kaifa (kai) → (i) kwa in Latinate → (ii) haifa, haiwa/wa in Germanic → iii) ta/sa in Greek/Irish or something similar. Also the auxiliary or modal words had true Arabic cognates. Consequently, the results indicate, contrary to Comparative Method claims, that Arabic, English, and all (Indo-)European languages belong to the same language, let alone the same family. They, therefore, prove the adequacy of the lexical root theory according to which Arabic, English, German, French, Latin, and Greek are dialects of the same language with Arabic being their origin all because of its phonetic complexity and huge lexical variety and multiplicity (10 v. 1).

Postcolonial Poland – a(n) (im)possible project

Starting with a brief definition of postcolonial criticism, the paper goes on to pinpoint the ideological and methodological reasons why Polish literature is not considered postcolonial by literary scholars in Poland and elsewhere. Among these reasons, two are major: the refusal of Western academia to recognize the “white colonialism” practiced by the Soviet Union with regard to its satellite countries, and the outdated structure of Slavic studies worldwide which, with rare exceptions (E. Thompson), are not prepared to enter into discussion with the methodological proposals of postcolonial studies. While attempts are being made by critics and scholars with respect to Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian literatures, Poland still remains an unchartered territory on the postcolonial ‘map’. The paper emphasizes that, following the pattern of Ireland and other postcolonial societies, Polish literary critics and scholars must first admit Poland’s postcolonial status with all its cultural implications, and then avail themselves of the instruments supplied by postcolonial studies in order to reconsider Polish literature of the last two centuries. This reconsideration should be expected to have a twofold effect. First, it should lead to a new understanding of problems and areas which are difficult to explain and articulate outside the postcolonial methodology. Second, it should afford a way out from the trap of particularism which for decades has been haunting Polish literary studies and has become a major obstacle on this literature’s way to reach a broader circle of readers outside Poland.

Published in the FlashPoints Series of Northwestern University Press, Form and Instability brings notions of figuration and translation to bear on the post-1989 condition. “Eastern Europe” in this book is more than a territory. Marked by belatedness and untimely remainders, it is an unstable object that is continually misapprehended. From the intersection of comparative literature, area studies, and literary theory, Starosta considers the epistemological and aesthetic consequences of the disappearance of the Second World. Literature here becomes a critical lens in its own right—both object and method, it confronts us with the rhetorical dimension of language and undermines the ideological and hermeneutic coherence of established categories. In original readings of Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz, among other twentieth-century writers, Form and Instability unsettles cultural boundaries as we know them.

This paper proposes a reading of Milica Bakić-Hayden`s inspired concept of “nesting orientalisms” in a wider regional context, by showing some of its first manifestations, as employed one hundred years or so ago. The debut of this phenomenon is part of the nineteenth century trend of travelling to “Eastern Europe”, and of appropriating it as such, in the desire to compete with the previous century, especially with the latter`s attempt of designing the map according to the dichotomy: “enlightened-ignorant peoples”.
Consequently, the adoption of the concept of “Eastern Europe” by the Western public opinion triggered reactions from the part of the local elites expressed in the establishment of a corpus of texts, which reflect on the nearby geographical area. This effort represented in fact the third stage of the dynamics West-East that accompanied the modernization in the region, consisting in “bringing Europe at home”: working notions of what we refer today as being Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central-Eastern Europe were implemented for sustaining a local ranking in terms of “civilization”.
The texts to be discussed in this article, apart from the century`s blind faith in progress, display the obsession of being “in between”, raising it to a sine qua non condition of the region; their authors often found themselves in difficulties in relation to dilemmas like professional/national identities, local/central loyalties, religious/secular views.

"""Polish dystopian fiction of the 80′s was usually described as a diagnosis of the totalitarian system and a reservoir of political allusions. I attempted to look at the subgenre from a different perspective, tracking in the footsteps of utopia as a way of thinking, a courage of combining intellectual rigor with imagination. The book “Polish >>fantastyka socjologiczna<<” (“Polska fantastyka socjologiczna. Poetyka i myślenie utopijne”, 2008) can be thus seen as a sequel to my 1998 book “Stanislaw Lem and utopia” (“Stanisław Lem wobec utopii”), which proposed a new perspective on Lem’s works, leading to a conclusion that utopia is a means of discovering and organizing values and ideas.
In “Polish social SF” I tried to prove that the cognitive charge carried by them reaches far beyond equations of allegory, which means, it transgresses the popular encryption of the political situation connected with the martial law in Poland (December 1981 - July 1983), and remains more than just a satire on the mechanisms of totalitarianism in Polish reality of the 1970s and 1980s.  Works of Marek Oramus, Edmund Wnuk-Lipiński, Maciej Parowski, Janusz A. Zajdel and others, embed strong allusions though, but they are mostly local. This is partly because of censorship. An analysis contained in my book is meant to show undermining and overwhelming tradition of utopian thinking in works usually interpreted as unambiguous dystopias. This is the foundation, which cannot be reduced to negative experience of totalitarianism. Both utopia and its dystopian counterpart are embedded in a greater meaningful environment of utopian thinking. My view of utopian thinking doesn’t focus on (suppressed and subversive) political activity, but nevertheless it keeps this activity in intentionally radical, intentionally fictitious limbo. Utopianism is interpreted here then as deeply and etymologically rooted in (science) fiction and evaluative cognitive activity, involving knowledge of economics, information technology, the science of control (cybernetics and systems theory), and ethics. A way of understanding our reality rather than social criticism.
The characteristic features of utopian thinking - seen as a conventionally fictitious writing/reading activity - include: complexity, paranoid imagination, apocalyptic imagination and subversion. They are stuck in the genetic equipment of science fiction genre, which can be put to good use in the works manifesting its power.
Complexity should be associated with the need to construct the framework of fiction different from the empirical world, but potentially coherent, and at the same time not immune to basic assumptions rationalization. It is this assumption to see the legacy of utopia, but you can also see the debt of this kind of fiction to science and scientific hypotheses requirements. However, as the utopia is in the self-conscious play with entrenched ideologies (as 'non-place'), so science fiction has developed the courage to operate conventional fiction and potential states of affairs. Utopia goes thus above and beyond, while creating its own dystopian contradiction, but also goes beyond politics and futurology by putting a priority mark to possibility, not necessity.
Paranoid imagination. Following in the footsteps of the dynamics of utopianism and dystopian fiction, it should be noted that in utopian fiction looking for consequences of basic assumptions simultaneously designate the boundaries, either in restraining the temptation of crossing, or by manifesting transgressiveness. Science fiction with ease - often excessive - launches a global perspective of change and (meta)history. Science fiction instead of fear of irrational manifests a fear of hyperrational system, inscrutable plan, something that - at first glance - seems to be chaotic, but after shifting to a higher plan could possibly (or in fictional fact) infect a perverse complexity. Consistency is always suspicious, never satisfactorily self-explaining, consequently always projects a higher plane or an overwhelming authority.

Apocalyptic narrative is born inside the consciousness of crisis, nourished by the prospect of radical change, as Kermode once wrote. Quite easily it forces a manipulation with our understanding of the past and with our image of the future. With these frictions science fiction, equipped with an apocalyptic dimension so conceived, constantly returns to the flesh. What is particularly interesting to determine the specificity of utopian thinking, is that abstract category of "omniscience" can be embodied in a science-fictional narrative, and often is in Polish social SF. So, apocalyptic imagination means a “fleshy” co-existence of conventionally perceived utopia and dystopia, thanks to a big charge of “the-end-is-nigh” obsession."""

Poland's answer to the cahiers de doléances: "social memoir" (pamiętnikarstwo społeczne), or autobiographical writings by youth, workers, peasants, immigrants, the unemployed, and others, gathered by sociologists in memoir-writing competitions. Like the cahiers de doléances in prerevolutionary France, social memoir accompanied broader discourses of crisis and reform in the Second Polish Republic. The article explores how complaint was framed and conceived as a meaningful speech act by both sociologists and memoirists, arguing that memoirists turned grievances drawn from everyday experience into demands rooted in a moral understanding of social justice. As such, social memoir has much in common with what, in other contexts, we would call witnessing or testimony, and was embedded in cultural assumptions about truth telling and the rights and obligations of citizenship. While critics of the social memoir genre complained that it was too full of complaints, memoirists presented their ability to complain as evidence of their subjecthood: I complain, therefore I am.

Belarus is often regarded as ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’, a fossilized leftover
from the Soviet Union. However, a key factor in determining Belarus’s development,
including its likely future development, is its own sense of identity.
This book explores the complex debates and competing narratives surrounding
Belarus’s identity, revealing a far more diverse picture than the widely accepted
monolithic post-Soviet nation. It examines in a range of media including
historiography, films and literature how visions of Belarus as a nation have been
constructed from the nineteenth century to the present day. It outlines a complex
picture of contested myths – the ‘peasant nation’ of the nineteenth century, the
devoted Soviet republic of the late twentieth century and the revisionist Belarusian
nationalism of the present. The author shows that Belarus is characterized by
immense cultural, linguistic and ethnic polyphony, both in its lived history and in
its cultural imaginary. The book analyses important examples of writing in and
about Belarus, in Belarusian, Polish and Russian, revealing how different modes
of rooted cosmopolitanism have been articulated.

Zjawisko dotyczące lokowania akcji filmów fabularnych czy seriali telewizyjnych w danym
mieście zostało już wielokrotnie przeanalizowane w literaturze odnoszącej się do marketingu
terytorialnego. Brakuje jednak publikacji analizujących wątek w kontekście współczesnych
powieści, szczególnie popularnych ostatnimi czasy, zarówno wśród autorów,
jak i czytelników, powieści kryminalnych. Niniejszy artykuł stara się uzupełnić tą lukę.
Jego celem jest analiza współczesnych powieści kryminalnych, pod kątem osadzenia ich
fabuły w polskich miastach, oraz ukazanie wpływu jaki wywierają one na wzbogacenie oferty
kulturalnej i organizację turystyki literackiej. Mimo że żaden z samorządów lokalnych nie
zdecydował się jeszcze na przeprowadzenie spójnej kampanii wizerunkowej miasta,
w oparciu o stworzony na zamówienie kryminał, można sądzić, że byłoby to narzędzie
efektywne, realnie przyczyniające się do budowania atrakcyjnego wizerunku miasta
i zwiększenia ruchu turystycznego

of Izbica (1800-1853) has been described as "the most radical of the Jewish mystics" and as a religious anarchist. 1 Some scholars have wondered how he managed to resist the antinomian pull of his own doctrine, and to "suffer the chaotic without perishing within it." 2 Yet this characterization bears witness to a profound tendency in much of the academic scholarship on Hasidism-and on religion in general-to privilege doctrine over practice, or to frame the object of study in theological and philosophical rather than ritual and hermeneutic terms. 3 It neglects, for instance, the fact that Hasidic texts are often devoted to the elaboration of ritual cosmologies, and that ritual "work" (including the management of emotional dispositions) almost always takes place over time. As the anthropologist Victor Turner has shown, this means that ritual symbols can take on different or even contradictory sets of meanings depending on where in an ongoing ritual process they are deployed. 4 When R.

The paper focuses on the issue of translation of intertextual markers in literature, with a special emphasis on Polish poetry in English renditions. The material and perspective are chosen with a view to exploring source-culture references in the literatures less known internationally, which, it is argued, is a sphere of particular cultural resistance to translation. The aim is to survey the importance of the level of explicitness of intertextual links for the task of a translator, but also to investigate recognisability-the other crucial factor-as well the interrelation of the two. First some assumptions about the conditions conducive to a successful rendering of intertextuality are formulated and tested. Then, based on several poetry excerpts, it is shown how, on the one hand, the level of explicitness influences the translators' choices and, on the other, how explicitating or implicitating procedures in translation influence the interpretative potential of the texts. Some instances of overcoming the resistance thanks to creative efforts are indicated. One of the author's tenets is that even a not readily decipherable marker can serve as a signal of intertextual relations. Интертекстуальность как переводческая проблема: эксплицитность и узнаваемость при переводе из «литератур небольших народов» Марта Казьмерчак Варшавский университет Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, Варшава, 00-927, Польша Аннотация Статья посвящена вопросу передачи интертекстуальных сигналов в художественной литературе, а особенно при переводе польской поэзии на английский язык. Выбор материала обусловлен задачей изучения интертекстуальных текстов в литературах, которые не являются широко извест-Marta Kaźmierczak. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2019, 23 (2), 362-382 TRANSLATION STUDIES TODAY AND TOMORROW 363 ными, что создает, по мнению автора, особые трудности при переводе. Цель данной статьи-исследовать два фактора, влияющие на трудности перевода: уровень эксплицитности (явности) меж-текстовой связи и узнаваемость архетекста, а также их взаимоотношение. В начале представлены именно эти условия, которые способствуют успешной передаче интертекстуальности. Данные установки затем подвергаются предварительной проверке. Затем на основе нескольких стихотвор-ных отрывков и их переводов автор показывает, как уровень явности влияет на переводческие решения и как, в свою очередь, примененные в переводе процедуры эксплицитации и имплицитации влияют на интерпретационный потенциал текстов. Приведены также примеры успешного преодо-ления объективных трудностей при передаче интертекстов. Автор утверждает, что даже маркер, который в целевом контексте нелегко поддается интерпретации, может сработать как сигнал межтекстовой связи. Ключевые слова: перевод, интертекстуальность, культурные асимметрии, польская литература, переводческие стратегии Для цитирования: Kaz´mierczakKaz´mierczak, Marta. Intertextuality as Translation Problem: Explicitness, Recognisability and the Case of "Literatures of Smaller Nations" // Вестник Российского университета дружбы народов. Серия: Лингвистика = Russian Journal of Linguistics

The article is a review of selected concepts concerning Polish literature of post-war resettlement of so-called Recovered Territories (1945−1989). The review allows to characterize the literary narrative about postwar dislocations in terms of its most important features. Its also allows to attempt to define this literature. migration literature, settlement literature, borderland, metanarrative Artykuł powstał dzięki środkom finansowym Narodowego Centrum Nauki, przyznanym na podstawie projektu badawczego nr 2015/17/N/HS2/03214. dyslokacji, którą można uznać za signum temporis tużpowojennej Polski. Należy od razu zaznaczyć, że nie było to doświadczenie jednolite, nie można go zamknąć po prostu w jednym, z góry określonym schemacie. Daje to możliwość odczytywania literatury o tzw. Ziemiach Odzyskanych w różnych kluczach interpretacyjnych oraz z wykorzystaniem rozmaitych założeń teoretycznych czy metodologicznych. W zależności od dominującej problematyki danego utworu, a także od przyjętej perspektywy badawczej beletrystykę o ziemiach przyłączonych po wojnie do Polski można interpretować z zastosowaniem różnych koncepcji, m.in. odnoszących się do specyfiki pogranicza, do teorii postkolonialnych czy raczej -na gruncie polskim -postzależnościowych, lub też w nawiązaniu do zwrotu topograficznego w badaniach literackich (z wykorzystaniem np. geopoetyki czy nowego regionalizmu). Temat przesiedleń podejmowali -z różnych perspektyw -tacy pisarze, jak m.in.: Halina Auderska, Józef Hen, Jan Huszcza Igor Newerly, Henryk Panas, Eugeniusz Paukszta, Stanisław Srokowski, Henryk Worcell i Zygmunt Trziszka 1 . Moim celem jest dokonanie przeglądu dotychczasowych koncepcji badawczych dotyczących tej literatury oraz zaprezentowanie takiej propozycji definicyjnej, która będzie uwzględniać możliwie specyficzne cechy piśmiennictwa o tzw. Ziemiach Odzyskanych.

“A VERY LONG TRAIN SET”: ON WOJCIECH TOMASIK’S TRAIN BOOKS

The review is a discussion on Wojciech Tomasik’s four monographs about railway in Polish culture. The superior categories of the issue’s critical view are “modernity,” “modernism,” and “modernisation.” The reviewer, employing the tools from Marxist historiography and history theory, also points at the concealments and gaps of the cognitive project which Tomasik formulated in his books.