The "Mythic Homeland" in Contemporary Polish Prose

Abstract

The 1 990s were witness to significant changes on the literary map of Poland: new regions and new trends emerged as the old ones evolved. Undoubtedly, a central place in this changing topography was occupied by works that represented both a continuation of and a challenge to the tradition of the so-called literature of mythic homelands--a literature of small, personal or minor homelands. These terms refer to a literary current which had for decades shaped the ways that the Polish landscape (whether physical or psychological) was presented in narrative form. Crucially, that tradition has ensured the primacy of the imagery of those territories lost to Poland (primarily the kresy , or eastern regions of prewar Poland) over those regained (the western territories of postwar Poland); and by extension, it has led to the dominance of the provinces of the past over those of the present. It is a tradition so strong and rich in postwar Polish prose that imitation or continuation in some form was inevitable; and yet at the same time, in its traditional manifestation it was a literary current too incompatible with the experiences of post-1989 Poland to be continued without undergoing serious transformation. It was therefore quite natural that a dynamic process of creative betrayals and literary polemics has characterized Polish prose of the last decade.As a result, not only has Poland's literary map evolved; but the special nature and the very content of the mythic homeland in Polish literature has changed as well. What ingredients, then, constitute the heritage of this literature of the mythic homeland-a heritage painstakingly constructed throughout the entire postwar period, by both emigre writers and those working in Poland? Certainly four basic characteristics of this literature can be named. First, in the works of emigre writers, the lands of prewar Poland's eastern kresy appear as a region in which, although everyone was different, none were foreign . The Hucul country of the Carpathian Mountains immortalized by Stanislaw Vincenz; Jerzy Stempowski's Dniester Valley; Jozef Wittlin's Polish-Ukrainian Lwow; the Polish-Austrian Galicia of Zygmunt Haupt and Andrzej Kusniewicz; Andrzej Chciuk's Drohobycz, now in Ukraine; the Berezya River region of present-day Belarus, described by Florian Czarnyszewicz; the Litwa of Czeslaw Milosz and Tadeusz Konwicki; and, finally, the Polish-German borderlands: the image of all these homelands which emerges in the literature is one of regions inhabited by multi-ethnic and multi-fa ith communities, full of varied customs and traditions. Yet at the same time, it is an image of peaceable communities, whose inhabitants live side-by-side without conflict. Despite their differences, no single one of these groups occupied a dominant position, or attempted to posit itself as the norm, which would in turn have made it possible-as happens in mono-ethnic nations-to define (and reject) outsiders. These writers' works present a picture of communities that were tolerant, even as they believed in upholding tradition; and that were surrounded by the pristine beauty of unspoiled nature. All of this evokes a kind of idealized Wild West, in which not only Indians and Whites live together peaceably (that is, resolving their conflicts without the use of force), but even Whites and Blacks, Secessionists and Unionists, Protestants and Catholics. The second characteristic derives from the first: within such pluralistic communities, identity was always open-ended-for it was shaped by the natural internalization of that most prized treasure of tradition: an attitude of tolerance. A society-wide respect for the Other, meant that everyone was different; but at the same time everyone was an insider. For these idyllic homelands were peopled by individuals for whom the concept of identity was tied to a region, and not to country, nation, or religion. Thus--evoking the image of a mythologized Wild West again--these were not so much natives of hazy or indefinite identity, as followers of the belief that over and above all differences there exists a more important, regional--or communal--unity. …