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SPONSOR:
LITERATURE | |||
| Polish literature has the convoluted, dramatic course of Polish history to
thank for its variety and individuality. From its beginnings - the first literary texts in Polish date back to the
13th century - till the end of the 18th century, Polish literature, the literature of a free country, experienced
all the adventures and revolutions of European literature, giving birth to world-class poets like Jan Kochanowski,
Mikołaj Sęp Sarzyński or Ignacy Krasicki, counted among Europe's greatest creators of the
Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment periods.
The close of the 18th century, when Poland disappeared from the map for over 120 years, was a moment which begat an extraordinary situation, rich in revitalising and at the same time lethal consequences for literature. For a nation deprived of its statehood and all accompanying institutions, the writer became a spiritual and political leader, moral authority, lawmaker, and guide. Literature was the keeper of the national cultural identity. Language was the only fatherland. This meant that in Polish literature of the 19th century, the words of the poet gained the status of the highest good, law, truth, almost an epiphany. The poet became the national "bard and prophet" and literature "the service and the mission". Such a challenge could only be accepted by the greatest poets of the 19th century: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, and Cyprian Kamil Norwid. Burdened by this patriotic duty, literature would at several moments during Polish history either surrender to the pressure of the people or rebel. Between "duty" and "rebellion" there stretches an area unusually rich in both ideas and aesthetics, where Polish poetry, prose and drama function to this day. |
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Between universality and hermetism - this dilemma and drama is illustrated by the fate and European significance
of the first Polish Nobel Literature laureates. Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), the author of the extremely
popular, "spirit lifting" historical novels about Polish history (to this day the most widely read books in the country),
gained world renown (and a Nobel Prize) for Quo Vadis, a novel depicting the birth of Christianity, since filmed many times.
Władysław Stanisław Reymont (1867-1925) was honoured for the The Peasants.
Polish 20th-century literature, particularly since Poland regained its independence after the First World War, was characterised by a mutiny against those "duties". Witold Gombrowicz, certainly the most admired contemporary Polish writer known worldwide, made this "Freedom from Polishness" the main theme of his innovative works. Such hitherto unknown qualities - ambiguous grotesque, philosophical catastrophism - appear in the writings of Bruno Schulz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, whose dramatic oeuvre preceded the "theatre of the absurd". Polish literature during the Communist era developed on two tracks. On the one hand, free from the limitations of censorship and all kinds of "ideological service" was Emigrant literature (Miłosz, Gombrowicz, Herling-Grudziński, Kołakowski); on the other was the literature created within the country, which had to find a way of existence and a language which would allow it to speak more or less normally in spite of the restrictions. After 1976, the birth of the literary "second circulation", illegal underground writings and publishers, in some sense "saved" Polish literature and helped the historical changes whose culminating point was 1989. Paradoxically, the conditions that made freedom of speech difficult, as well as the historical circumstances, helped the formation of the "Polish School of Poetry". Its most characteristic feature is the ability to speak of the fate of the individual caught in history, to link the existential and metaphysical with the historical. From a completely different perspective - and in a different language - is this destiny described by the grotesque dramaturgy of Sławomir Mrożek. And further, in his own field of philosophical "science-fiction", the work of Stanisław Lem, one of the most important writers in this field today. The picture is completed by the prose of Jerzy Andrzejewski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Tadeusz Konwicki, Andrzej Szczypiorski, and Marek Hłasko, who have been translated into many languages. After the fall of Communism in 1989, new tendencies appear, or gain in strength, in Polish literature. The most important and interesting of these are the attempts to find spiritual roots or regional identity within recent history (the novels of Paweł Huelle, Stefan Chwin, Antoni Libera), as well as attempts to introduce the language of the mass media and the symbols and heroes of mass culture into literature. Between tradition and contemporaneity, between "duty" and "rebellion", between metaphysics and history, a present-day Polish literature is developing, a literature "on the move", aiming at understanding and recording the truth about the human adventure in the world... Sławomir Mrożek | |||
