"RIGHTEOUS TRAITORS. NEIGHBORS FROM VOLYN" BY WITOLD SZABŁOWSKI: REPORTAGE AS MEMORY AND RESEARCH

Abstract

The article is about the peculiarities of the realization of memory in Witold Szabłowski's book "Sprawiedliwi zdrajcy. Sąsiedzi z Wołynia" (in the Ukrainian edition: "Кулемети й вишні. Історії про добрих людей з Волині."/"Machine guns and cherries. Stories about good people from Volyn"). Updating the theme of the Volhynian tragedy of 1943, the author created a report about his travels to Volhynia to find Ukrainians who, during the Ukrainian-Polish conflict, saved Poles, often at the cost of their own lives.
 The research is focused on the mechanisms and reasons for the difference in the Ukrainian and Polish perception of both the book in general and the situations depicted in it (the reader's reception of the book"; the reader's and author's reception of the events depicted in the analyzed book and other sources, in particular in the books of the Ukrainian historian Ivan Pushchuk). It was found that after reading a certain text the effective ability of the recipient to create a perception of that text depends on the reader's experience and other factors, including prospective collective memory, that is, a memory of intentions, which not only recounts past events but at the same time provides a template for future events and experiences (K. Tenenboim-Weinblatt). It is about the phenomenon of narrative unreliability (at the levels of both the testimonies of "informants" – direct participants in the events and the documentarian who records these testimonies) and the idea of the "collective need to forget" (Susan Sontag) as a way of countering modern conflicts that may arise due to historical memory.
 The concepts listed above taken into account, the article analyzes one of the main documentary stories of the book. That story tells about the fate of Jerzy Krasowski, an officer, lieutenant colonel of the Polish Army, whose biography is inscribed in Polish history as exemplary victorious, and his son Jarema Krasowski, a resident of Russia, who 60 years after the Volhynian tragedy met his father for the first time.