Wielka Kołomyja. Wokół ludyczności w wybranych powieściach Edmunda Niziurskiego

Abstract

The author of the paper explores two dichotomous phenomena — boredom and entertainment — in Polish prose for children from the period of PRL, basing on the adventure novels written by Edmund Niziurski in the 1960s: Awanturza w Niekłaju (1962) and Siódme wtajemniczenie (1969). Both notions are discussed from the perspective of ethnography, anthropology, and the history of childhood. Referring to Roger Caillois’s concepts of play and games, the researcher analyses the images of transformation of entertainment behaviours as presented by young characters from Niziurski’s novels, and links between the text and social and political reality in Poland of the 1960s. Her findings indicate that, in his writing of this period, Niziurski both withdrew from socrealistic poetics and abandoned the ideological, persuasive function of entertainment for the sake of uninhibited, spontaneous children’s games and play.