Wspólnoty kobiet w pisarstwie i życiu Anny Kowalskiej

Abstract

Women’s Communities in the Writing and Life of Anna Kowalska The article is devoted to the writing and biography of Anna Kowalska. The first part discusses the shared home of Maria Dąbrowska and Anna Kowalska, in which women hired as housekeepers played a vital role. Then the article briefly analyses Kowalska’s novel Safona (Sappho), which depicts the aging Greek female poet surrounded by her young protégées. The main focus is, however, on the novel Gruce (The Gruca family), co-published in 1936 by Anna Kowalska and her husband, Jerzy Kowalski. The novel was heavily revised by Kowalska and reprinted in 1961, and then in 1968. One of the side motifs of this vast work explores a women’s agricultural cooperative in a village near Lviv in the second half of the 1930s. The utopian projects of feminism and cooperativism are criticised here, while the entire novel fits in the “dark” formula of psychological and social (“populist” in the language of the era) realism, characteristic of that decade.