Post-trauma, Gender and Ecology
Paths of Slavic Literatures
Summary
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Table of Contents
- Preface (Alessandro Amenta, Marina Ciccarini & Bianca Sulpasso)
- 1 Humanity, Non-humanity, Monstrosity. An Eco-critical Reading of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Imaginary World (Alessandro Amenta)
- Introduction
- Background and Context
- Monstrosity vs. Humanity
- Non-humanity
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
- 2 Chornobyl’s Leaves and Flowers. The Botanical Trauma of Non-human Witnesses (Nadia Caprioglio)
- The Witness Beyond the Human
- The Herbarium
- Aestheticisation of the Zone and ‘Hyperobjects’
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- 3 Ecology, Trauma and Corporeity in the Works by Małgorzata Lebda (Marina Ciccarini)
- Sprawy ziemi: Symbiosis, Empathy
- Mer de Glace: Maps, Geographies, Bodies
- Bibliography
- 4 Conflict and Reconciliation: The Relationship Between Men and Nature in Bliskie kraje by Julia Fiedorczuk (Noemi Fregara)
- Introduction: The Emergence of Pro-ecological Narrations
- The Polish Literary Panorama
- The Conflict: A Struggle for Survival
- The New Alliance Between Women and Nature
- Reconciliation: Return to the Original Home
- Conclusions: From Threat to Harmony
- Bibliography
- 5 Logos and Revolution: The Search for a Living Language in the Ruins (The Case of Nadezhda Murav’eva’s Odigitriia) (Eleonora Gallucci)
- Introduction
- Plot. Chronotope. Names: Onomastics, Toponomastics
- Hodegetria. Icon
- Communication. Empty Words and Full Speech. Rechevitsa
- In Lieu of a Conclusion
- Bibliography
- 6 The Poisoned Legacy of the Soviet Past: Landscapes in Ol’ga Slavnikova’s Fiction (Gabriella Elina Imposti)
- Bibliography
- 7 Myth and the Sacredness of Nature. Notes on the Prose of Alisa Ganieva (Irina Marchesini)
- Methodological Framework
- The Mountain and the Wall
- Bibliography
- 8 The Trauma of the Yugoslav Dissolution in the Works of Ivana Bodrožić and Elvira Mujčić (Neira Merčep)
- Introduction
- The Commonalities Between Bodrožić and Mujčić: Issues of Trauma and Identity
- Interplay Between Traumatic Memory, Narrative and the Process of ʻWorking Throughʼ
- Dynamics of Loss and Identity Reconstruction
- What Next?
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- 9 Fantasy, Women’s Detective Story and Alternate History Time-Travel as a Literary Response to Post-Soviet Trauma (Dmitry Novokhatskiy)
- Post-Soviet Trauma: Definition
- Post-Soviet Trauma and Mass Literature
- Fantasy: Eliminating the Trauma
- Alternate History: Deceiving the Trauma
- Women’s Detective Story: Overcoming the Trauma
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
- 10 Memory and Narration in Kapustin Iar by Svetlana Vasilenko: Exploring a Hermeneutics of Existence in Contemporary Russian Literature (Gloria Politi)
- Towards an Introduction to Russian Literature of the 1990s
- Svetlana Vasilenko and the Truth of Writing
- Memory, Identity and Narrative
- Bibliography
- 11 Dystopia and Utopia as Expressions of the New Dissent: The Case of Post by Dmitrii Glukhovskii, the ‘Inoagent’ (Foreign Agent) (Donatella Possamai)
- A Brief Premise: What Does It Mean ‘Contemporariness’, and What Is Its Literary Expression in Today’s Russia?
- Back to Glukhovskii’s Post
- Bibliography
- 12 The Role of Personal Memory and Collective Trauma in the Unity and Fragmentation of the Self: An Analysis of Guzel’ Iakhina’s Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (Iryna Shylnikova)
- The Contemporary Reinterpretation of Soviet Repressions in Post-Soviet Literature
- Personal Memory and the Fate of the ‘Little Man’ in Guzel’ Iakhina’s Historical Narrative
- Zuleika’s Eyes Open: A Story of Awakening
- Bibliography
- Selected Bibliography on Polish Eco-critical Studies (Noemi Fregara)
- Selected Bibliography on Russian Trauma Studies and Émigré Literature (Sara Gargano)
- Online Projects on Current Diaspora
- Appendix
- Notes on Contributors
Preface
This book explores the intersections between trauma, gender, and ecology in contemporary Slavic literatures, offering a critical perspective on the cultural transformations that characterize post-communist contexts. Through close readings of prose, poetry, and other literary forms, it investigates how narratives from Russia, Poland, and Croatia address the legacies of violence, displacement, and environmental deterioration. Drawing on insights from trauma studies, gender theory, and ecocriticism, the volume shows how Slavic authors rethink identity, memory, and the relationship between humans and the natural world in the face of ongoing socio-political crises and ecological instability. By foregrounding marginalized voices and multiple narrative strategies, the study underscores the literature’s capacity to confront both individual and collective wounds while questioning dominant historical and environmental discourses.
Building on this framework, the volume further explores how contemporary Slavic writers reveal the entanglement of post-traumatic experience, gendered embodiment, and ecological crisis within the literary imagination. Across a range of narrative forms, authors from various post-communist regions of Europe scrutinize the lingering effects of political violence while giving prominence to vulnerable bodies – human and non-human – shaped by systemic oppression and environmental decline. These works often articulate trauma through gendered perspectives, situating memory within domestic, rural, and post-industrial landscapes marked by decay or unexpected resilience. Ecological motifs frequently serve as symbols and extensions of psychic distress, exposing the parallels between degraded environments and fractured identities.
The volume emerging from this project was developed within a PRIN, an Italian national competitive research grant titled From Post-Trauma to Ecology: Contemporary Gender Narratives in Slavic Cultural Texts. It brings together the work of an Italian research group composed of scholars from five universities: University of Rome Tor Vergata, University of Salento, University of Padua, University of Turin, and the University of Bologna. They analyse how these literatures depict the pressures that political violence and environmental degradation exert on communities, bodies, and everyday life. In doing so, the study highlights the transformative potential of Slavic literatures to engage with intertwined personal and environmental vulnerabilities.
1 Humanity, Non-humanity, Monstrosity. An Eco-critical Reading of Andrzej Sapkowski’s Imaginary World
ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to analyse how the Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski employs the concepts of humanity and monstrosity not only as literary and philosophical tropes but also as metaphors for Poland’s history. The Witcher series contains several allusions to hot topics that animated the public debate in the 1980s and the 1990s, such as environmentalism, racism and discrimination. Far from being disengaged and undemanding, Sapkowski’s series turns out to be a space to reflect on the moral, political and social changes that affected Poland in the transition period from late communism to capitalism. Particular attention is paid to the definition of what is human and what is not and to the relationship with non-human otherness, showing that ethical and not ontological criteria are followed by the writer in order to define mankind.
Keywords: Andrzej Sapkowski, The Witcher, humanity, non-humanity, monstrosity, ecocriticism
Introduction
Written beginning in the 1980s, the story of the monster hunter Geralt of Rivia by the novelist Andrzej Sapkowski is a fiction series known with the encompassing title The Witcher. It consists of fifteen short stories, first released in the magazine Fantastyka in the 1980s and later combined in two fixups (The Last Wish and Sword of Destiny), five novels that form the saga proper (Blood of Elves, Time of Contempt, Baptism of Fire, The Tower of the Swallow, The Lady of the Lake), a sidequel released fourteen years afterwards (Season of Storms) and, more recently, a prequel (Crossroads of Ravens).1
The series was initially marked by the retelling of well-known fairy tales and literary motifs, from Beauty and the Beast to Snow White, but soon headed towards a more original and wide-ranging narration dealing with political intrigue, cultural clashes and the threat of the end of the world. Sapkowski’s prose can be considered an example of postmodern fantasy built on such devices as intertextuality, metafiction, citationism, (pop)cultural references, literary allusions, unveiling of narrative schemes, pastiche and irony (see Gemra 2001; Kaczor 2006; Roszczynialska 2009). Its fruition relies on ‘double coding’ (Eco 2005), which allows ‘popular readers’ with no particular cultural knowledge to enjoy the story only partially, as entertainment fiction, while ‘informed readers’ will engage with the author in a game based on the decoding of allusions and intertextual references that provides a more complete comprehension of the text.2 According to Kaczor (2015: 251, my translation), The Witcher represents ‘the architext of Polish fantasy literature’, namely a model of plot construction, character creation and storytelling that shaped the fantasy genre in Poland, establishing its main features and traits. Furthermore, Sapkowski’s novels developed a cult status over time and gave rise to a still ongoing transmedia network with several adaptations in other media such as videogames, comic books, board and card games, films and TV series, eventually becoming a media franchise (see Flamma 2020).
A central role in Sapkowski’s writing is played by the notions of humanity, non-humanity and monstrosity, not only as literary motifs and fantasy conventions that are functional to create an imaginary universe but also as sociopolitical metaphors. The author employs them to reflect on major issues that have accompanied Poland’s delicate transition from late communism to capitalism. From this perspective, the fantasy genre becomes a means to express, in a figurative but easily decodable manner, a number of considerations on themes such as environmentalism, racism, anti-Semitism or abortion, at the heart of the Polish public debate of that time.
Three concepts will notably help us explain how these topics are disguised as a seemingly disengaged fantasy story: speciesism (Ryder 1971), estrangement (Spiegel 2008) and adiaphorisation (Bauman, Donskis 2013). In Sapkowski’s works, the criticism of the blind belief in the primacy of humans over non-humans takes the form of speciesism, understood as ‘a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species’ (Singer 1990: 6). As we will see, the author problematises and questions the same notion of ‘species’ also thanks to the particular means provided by the fantasy genre. The estrangement is a rhetorical device consisting of a ‘reversal of a cognitive nature’ (Scaffai 2022: VI), which allows the readers to see the world from a non-human perspective. Lastly, adiaphorisation involves an ethical blindness that causes insensitivity, depersonalisation and exclusion of the ‘other’ from the ‘universe of moral obligations’ (Bauman, Donskis 2013: 40). These concepts outline a framework that allows us to understand how Sapkowski masks, through a rich repertory of fantasy motifs, a reflection on the changing contemporary reality.
Background and Context
The story is set on a planet that recalls medieval Europe, though it is not our Earth, but an imaginary world, namely an allotopia, ‘a possible world structurally different from the real one’ (Eco 1990: 174, my translation), inhabited by several races (elves, dwarves, gnomes but also dryads, ghouls, vampires and other species of the new invention) that cohabit in constant conflict. From a chronological point of view, a cosmic cataclysm called the Conjunction of the Spheres affected the multiverse in the distant past. Many different planets temporarily overlapped, resulting in all sorts of creatures being thrown and trapped in the dimension where the story takes place. Amongst them were also humans, who are therefore presented as an alien and not an autochthonous species, who reached the Continent (the part of the world where the narration is set) during the First Landing.3 From being cosmic castaways, they soon turned into colonisers who conquered every piece of land, draining, abusing and polluting it, and exterminating or subjugating other races:
Because it was us, human beings, who were the intruders here. This land was ruled by dragons, manticores, griffins and amphisboenas, vampires and werewolves, striga, kikimoras, chimera and flying drakes. And this land had to be taken from them bit by bit, every valley, every mountain pass, every forest and every meadow. (Sapkowski 2020a: 162)
It is not difficult to read here criticism both of colonialism and of the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources and the rapid extinction of animal and plant species implemented by man, portrayed as ‘a decisive agent of systemic transformation’ (Scaffai 2022: VI, my translation). The author introduces clear allusions to issues at the heart of the early ecological discussions in Poland and worldwide, from climate change to greenhouse gases, ozone depletion and global warming. See, for example, the dialogue between Geralt and the priestess of Melitele, Nenneke, in her cave hothouse, in which Sapkowski manages to include scientific explanations in a strictly fantastic scenario:
‘Half of the plants you’ve got here don’t grow anywhere else anymore. Am I right?’
‘Yes. More than half’.
‘How come?’
‘If I said it was through the goddess Melitele’s grace, I daresay that wouldn’t be enough for you, would it?’
Details
- Pages
- 250
- Publication Year
- 2026
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631920589
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631920596
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783631920572
- DOI
- 10.3726/b21925
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2026 (February)
- Keywords
- Trauma Studies Ecocriticism Gender Studies Literary Studies Slavic Studies
- Published
- Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2026. 250 pp.
- Product Safety
- Peter Lang Group AG
