The Marginal Other in Post-Soviet Space (Observations on Polish Literary Reportage Concerning the East)

Abstract

The paper analyzes Polish literary reportage as a trend evolved from a rather marginalized position of a hybrid genre to a prized form of literary expression in the last decades. More often than not, the genre’s main focus in the unprivileged, problematic or unknown marginal Other, which is visible in the journalistic fiction about Poland’s eastern neighbors. At the same time, the imagining of the Other can be problematic and biased, which is a major concern for the authors, whose position between the belletristic and the journalistic poses different demands on the texts about Russia. The major political, cultural and economic post-1989 transformation in the countries of the former USSR occupy a privileged place among the topics of the genre. The text compares the representation of post-Soviet reality in the literary reportages of Ryszard Kapuściński, Jacek Hugo-Bader and Jędrzej Morawiecki, focussing on the depiction of the marginalized groups in the postcommunist society. The texts argues that each decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse brings forth a different type of marginalization (ethnic and political in the 1990s; social and cultural in the 2000s; religious and ideological in the 2010s).