Pogranicze cieszyńskie, pogranicza identyfikacji – wymiary inności i obcości w tekstach Jana Wantuły, Jana Szczepańskiego i Józefa Pilcha

Abstract

The article’s aim is to present different applications of the categories of otherness and strangeness appearing in texts of a sociologist Jan Szczepanski as well as book-lovers and historians-amateurs Jan Wantula and Jozef Pilch. Each of them was born in an evangelical peasant family in Ustron in Cieszyn Silesia, and they were connected by family ties and friendship. The authoress considers how their growing up on cultural and national border influenced functioning of title categories in their writings, and also how they build the figure of Stranger from a perspective of borderland as well as the image of their own otherness to Poland. It consists i.a. of identification with the different model of culture, related to Protestant ethos. On this background the problem of their relation to different religions appears which leads to the matter of solidarity, seeing in the Other the second “me” and otherness in “me.” The latter is probed in Szczepanski’s, Pilch’s and Wantula’s autobiographical texts, and the way toward that is Cieszyn Silesia’s specific. The authoress shows that otherness not only marks identity but also permits better understanding who one is.