Zagajewski’s Reflections on the Interior

Abstract

The text asks the question about Adam Zagajewski’s understanding of the interior space of one’s home. Guided by his post-memory, Zagajewski describes a coping mechanism based on withdrawal into one’s place and its interiority that was construed by the Poles resettled from former Polish territories in the East as an etui, a cover protecting the traumatized selves and their memorabilia from the new, unacceptable reality. Such a protective etui created by the four walls of one’s room was during communism a site of collecting and even hoarding broken things. Obsessive collecting lead to the destruction of even a modicum of comfort and the optic perspective in the over-crowded rooms. The consequence of these two processes of interiorization allows the author to refute the notion that Zagajewski was an aesthete.