АКСІОЛОГІЧНО-ЕТИЧНИЙ ВИМІР ЛІТЕРАТУРНИХ РЕПОРТАЖІВ «ТИ НАЧЕ КАМІНЬ ЇЛА» ТА «Я НАМАЛЮЮ ТОБІ СМЕРТЬ» ВОЙЦЕХА ТОХМАНА

Abstract

Reportage is a genre on the borderline between non-fiction and fiction. Because of their inherent hybridity, which undoubtedly has a significant impact on their form and content, they often cross these boundaries, especially in recent decades. In these times of rapid and easy access to information, the understanding of the reporter’s work has also changed, and his role is now to relate the superficial, the everyday and the present to universal and human criteria. It is he who can and should organize man’s knowledge of the world by placing it against the background of universal moral judgements or social sensibilities. Awareness of the truth, of the reality of the events described, must speak deeply to the reader. Such principles of touching upon humanity’s innate empathy, shocking and forcing after reading the texts to answer the important ontological questions posed by the reporter, are characteristic of reporter’s prose by Wojciech Tochman. This article focuses on two collections of reportages, «Jakbyś kamień jadła» (“Like eating a stone. Surviving the Past in Bosnia”) and «Dzisiaj narysujemy śmierć» («We are Going to Draw Death”), which are linked by the exposure of the face of evil through the extraction of drastic experiences from the memories of witnesses, victims and killers. Through their testimonies, the Polish reporter reveals the macabre mechanics of genocide, while at the same time attempting to find answers as to how survivors can rebuild a destroyed world by soothing their psychological wounds. Tochman is constantly aware that his primary task is to present the facts, even if this involves revealing the shocking truth. The transformation of the notion of trust and the notion of social ties are vividly revealed in the texts. A separate point of reference in the thesis is the Ukrainian reception of the two collections of reportages, as the dynamics of their reception is a clear indicator of how interdependent are the reflections on the reading of the pain and suffering of those who survived the ethnic massacres in the Balkans or the Rwandan genocide massacre, the passivity towards the presented facts versus the absence of a similar experience.