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Title: Modalities of Polish Modernism

Modalities of Polish Modernism

by Włodzimierz Bolecki (Author)
©2025 Monographs 572 Pages
Science, Society & Culture
Series: Polish Studies – Transdisciplinary Perspectives, Volume 47

Summary

The book presents twentieth-century Polish literature as an example of Eastern European modernism while foregrounding the understanding of modernity in Polish literature. Bolecki persuasively argues for his own conception of modernism, which he grounds in an exploration of both the affinities and divergences of Eastern European and Western European modernism, while considering not only literary and historical issues but also social, political, and cultural dimensions.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title Page
  • Copyright Page
  • Table of Contents
  • Foreword
  • Studies
  • Introduction: The Periodization of Polish Literature
  • The Periodization of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature to Date
  • Young Poland (1890–1918)
  • The Interwar Period, or the Second Polish Republic (1919–1939)
  • The Second World War (1939–1945)
  • Polish People’s Republic (PRL: 1945–1990)
  • Periodization of the Polish People’s Republic’s Literature
  • The Third Polish Republic
  • Consequences
  • Currents and Periods
  • Émigré Literature and Modernism
  • Emigration in the History of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature
  • The Caesura of 1956
  • Two Modernisms
  • Modernism and Émigré Literature
  • A Glance at the Twentieth-Century Polish Literature
  • Modernism in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature: A Reconnaissance
  • Modernism and the Traditions of Modernity
  • The Concepts of Modernism in Poland: Selected Questions
  • Kazimierz Wyka “Polish Modernism”
  • The First Concept
  • The Second Concept
  • Jan Józef Lipski Concept of Modernism
  • “Modernism Without Qualities”
  • From Modernism (1890–1918) to Modernity (Since 1918)
  • Artistic Criticism and the History of Art
  • Problems with the Term
  • Modernism in Poland: History and Chronology
  • Problems with the Object
  • The Dominant Features of Modernism in Polish Literature
  • Symbolism
  • Vitalism
  • Essentialism
  • Relationism
  • Conventionalism
  • Poeticity
  • Constructivism
  • Periodization
  • An Introduction to the Draft Concept
  • Impressionism in the Polish Modernist Prose: An Introduction
  • Principium Individuationis: Nietzschean Motifs in Bruno Schulz’s Oeuvre
  • Instead of the Conclusion
  • Texts and Voices: The Questions of Modernist Poetics
  • From Postmodernism to Modernism: Aleksander Wat – Another Experience
  • Modality: Literary Studies and Cognitivism – A Reconnaissance
  • Hypotheses
  • Modality as a Question of Historical Poetics
  • Modernist Currents
  • Scientific Revolution in the Early Twentieth Century: An Introduction
  • Modernist Currents in Poland
  • Parnassianism
  • The Decadent Movement
  • Expressionism
  • Aesthetics
  • The Poetics
  • The 1918 Expressionism
  • Polemics: Przybyszewski – Strindberg – Irzykowski
  • Point of Arrival
  • Expressionism and Formism
  • Expressionism After 1939
  • Symbolism
  • Futurism
  • Futurism as Counterculture
  • Polish Futurism as the Art of the Future
  • The Futurist Concept of Modernity
  • Futurism and Expressionism
  • Futurism and Dadaism
  • Futurism and Formism
  • Futurism and Surrealism
  • The Attitude Toward Futurism
  • Paradoxes of Polish Futurism
  • The Avant-Garde
  • The Krakow Avant-Garde
  • The Avant-Garde and Futurism in Poland: Differences
  • The Avant-Garde and Constructivism
  • The Avant-Garde and Surrealism
  • Paradoxes of the Avant-Garde in Poland
  • The Idea of Avant-Gardism
  • Neoclassicism
  • Catastrophism
  • Two Modernist Motifs
  • The City
  • The Myth
  • Modernism’s Literary Diagnoses
  • Introduction
  • Digressions
  • Naturalism
  • Reception of Western Literature
  • Subjectivity in Narration
  • Verse Novel
  • Modern Novel: Aniela Gruszecka Concept
  • The 1920s and the 1930s: The Differences
  • Indicators of Early Modernist Prose
  • “Guiding Intelligence”
  • “Single Cause” Novel
  • The “Mythical Method”
  • Realism as Convention
  • Realism versus Poeticity
  • The Criticism of Social Stereotypes in Language
  • “Private” Symbolism
  • Other Characteristics
  • Destructions of Mimetic Reality Representation: Schulz and Gombrowicz
  • Analyses and Interpretations
  • Uncovering the Unconscious
  • Stanisław Przybyszewski: The Mystical mare tenebrarum
  • A Precursor of Modern literature
  • Metafiction of Early Modernism: Pałuba by Karol Irzykowski (1903)
  • Verbalization of the Unconscious
  • Project of a New Psychology
  • Metafiction and Metanarration
  • Pałuba (1903) and Ferdydurke (1937)
  • Time and Chance
  • Self-referentiality According to Ferdynand Goetel (From Day to Day, 1926)
  • Time, Chance, and the Metaphysics of Morality: Straszny czwartek w domu pastora (1939) by Karol Ludwik Koniński
  • From Strindberg to Happening
  • The 1920s
  • The Plot
  • Metafiction
  • Narration: A Chronicle of Simultaneity
  • Composition: Added Meanings and Symbolism
  • Variants of Modernism
  • Functions of Memory
  • Memory, Time, Consciousness: “The Maids of Wilko” by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1932)
  • Memory, “Sickness unto Death,” Consciousness: The Impatient Ones by Zofia Nałkowska (1939)
  • Other Modernities
  • Genocide and the Beginnings of Modern Prose: Zofia Nałkowska Choucas (1925–1927)
  • Choucas: A Polish Version of The Magic Mountain
  • Modern Poetics
  • Autobiographism and Anti-Fictionality
  • The Limitation of Omniscience
  • Novel – Journal – Notes
  • Nationalism and Colonialism
  • “One Nation Should Not Oppress Another”
  • Difference, Otherness, Modern Sensitivity
  • Was Witkacy an Antisemite? (Pożegnanie jesieni, 1926)
  • A Part of a Bigger Whole
  • “Jewess,” “Little Jew,” “Kike”
  • “I Was Speaking about Poles as a Pole”
  • Historical Prose of Mature Modernism: Wacław Berent’s Opowieści biograficzne (1934–1939)
  • Document and Biography
  • Modernization: The Modernists’ Subject
  • Historiography as Writing
  • The Poetics of a Modernist Biography
  • Modernization and Multiculturality
  • Forgetting and Anonymity
  • From the Decadent Movement to Modernization
  • Polemic with Nationalism
  • Modernist Catastrophism
  • Historical Prose of Mature Modernism
  • Józef Mackiewicz Modernity
  • From Stereotypes to Nationalist Myths
  • Against Nationalisms
  • Patriotism of Landscape
  • The Country Idea
  • Settling Accounts with the Twentieth Century
  • Mackiewiczian Postcolonialism
  • Anti-Modern Modernity: Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz (1937/1938)
  • Under Form’s Oppression
  • Youth: A Myth of Modern Culture
  • Discourses of Domination: Family, Social Structures
  • Man Imprisoned Within Himself
  • Imitation: Mechanisms of Form
  • Linguistic Reality
  • Modernist Aphoristic Style
  • Authorial Narration
  • Mackiewicz and Gombrowicz
  • Mythization of Reality: Bruno Schulz’s Concept of Literature
  • Modernist Initiations: The Case of Czesław Miłosz
  • The Consequences of Stalinism: The Captive Mind (1953)
  • The Emptiness
  • The Absurd
  • The Necessity
  • The Success
  • The Book of Rebels: The Issa Valley (1955)
  • Poetics
  • Realism
  • Symbolic World
  • Autobiography Concealed
  • A Novel of Initiation
  • Annex
  • Postcolonialism versus Modernism
  • Wisława Szymborska and Modernism
  • Experience and Modernism
  • From Ancient to Modernist Grotesque: History, Terminology, and Phenomenon
  • Definitional Challenges
  • The Term
  • Hybrids
  • Motifs
  • Hyperbole, Caricature, Monsters
  • Gothicism
  • Grotesque in the Nineteenth Century
  • Early Modernist Grotesque (Young Poland)
  • Mythological Grotesque
  • Medieval Grotesque
  • Commedia dell’arte Motifs
  • Fantastic Grotesque
  • Repeated and Violated Conventions
  • Felicjan Faleński
  • Jan Lemański
  • Adolf Nowaczyński
  • Roman Jaworski
  • Early Modernism: Summary
  • Forgotten Language: Grotesque and the Avant-Garde
  • Jaworski – Witkacy
  • Schulz – Leśmian – Gombrowicz (and others)
  • Aleksander Wat
  • The Warsaw Faust of 1919
  • Late Modernist Grotesque: Introduction
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Bibliography
  • Note about Bibliography
  • Index of Names

Introduction: The Periodization of Polish Literature

One of the first difficulties facing anyone who studies Polish literature is its periodization.1 Whereas the history of Western European literatures distinguishes entire centuries, the history of Polish literature includes a surprisingly large number of very short epochs, periods, and subperiods – especially in the twentieth century. The history of Western literatures comprises artistic/ideological currents or periods, including modernism; in twentieth-century Polish literature, the “period” is always defined by political events. The multiplicity of these periods and subperiods may seem chaotic and irrational, and their historical and political determinants may appear as a reduction of literature to external matters. However, we should remember that such a situation stems from Polish history.

The boundaries of most historical and literary eras in Polish literature were important political events – mainly uprisings, wars, and changes of power or political systems. For example, the conventional end of Polish Romanticism is the date of the January Uprising (1863/1865), which simultaneously begins the period of Polish Positivism. The conventional end of Young Poland (1918) is the year when the First World War ended and Poland regained its independence. Almost the same date marks the beginning of the next period known as the interwar period, or, in other terminology, the literature of Independent Poland or the Second Polish Republic (1918/1919–1939). Nearly all the consecutive dates considered as the boundaries of eras in twentieth-century Polish literature denote similar events: 1939 – the beginning of the Second World War, 1945 – its end, and the beginning of the communist regime in Poland, 1956 – the end of Stalinism in Poland, 1968 – the student strikes, and 1989 – the fall of communism.

In this sense, the periodization of Polish literature was always subordinated to universal and national history; in other words, this periodization remained a function of political history divisions. Time and again, the frequent political changes in Poland – and in Central Europe as a whole – abruptly changed the development conditions for literature, its language, issues, systems, means of communication, and, as a result, the themes and conventions of expression. Let me present an outline of this periodization.

The history of the Polish state comprises five fundamentally different periods. These are:

  1. The First Polish Republic: from the establishment of the state (the tenth century) to the Third Partition of Poland by three neighboring states – Austria, Prussia, and Russia (1795).
  2. The Partition Period: 1795–1918.
  3. The Second Polish Republic (1918–1939) and the Second World War (1939–1945): under Stalin’s agreement with Hitler (of August 23, 1939), the territories of the Second Polish Republic fall under German occupation (from September 1, 1939) and Soviet occupation (from September 17, 1939). This marks the fourth partition of Poland, but a Polish government-in-exile functions in London, recognized by the Allies.
  4. The Polish People’s Republic (PRL) (1945–1989). Both dates are conventional. They denote the introduction of communism in Poland and its collapse after an agreement between the Communist Party and the opposition and the following unfavorable outcome of elections for the communists. For the first time since 1947, the Soviet bloc saw the first coalition government, formed by Solidarity and the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), with a non-communist prime minister.
  5. The Third Polish Republic (since 1989/1990).

From the end of the First Polish Republic (1795) to the establishment of the Third Republic (the conventional date of 1989/1990), meaning over the last two centuries, Poland was an independent state for only twenty years (during the Second Republic, 1918–1939). In Western Europe and the USA, these two centuries comprised the emergence of modern states, political and social systems, and the foundations of modern economy, the development of public life institutions, education, technology, and science, the formation of modern structures of the democratic state, and so on. Meanwhile, the Polish society remained practically excluded from this great civilizational acceleration.

In the nineteenth century, the lack of state and the partitioners’ anti-Polish policy, whose goals included de-nationalization, meant that the Poles’ fundamental problem was the struggle for the survival of national consciousness. In the twentieth century, during the Second World War, they struggled for actual biological survival, as both the Third Reich and the USSR sought to exterminate Polish society, especially its most educated strata. At the same time, the Third Reich condemned the Polish citizens of Jewish origin to total extermination as part of Endlösung – the “final solution of the Jewish question.”

After 1945, the totalitarian system of Soviet communism annexed Poland, preventing the state’s economic development. At the USSR’s behest, the Polish communists refused to adopt the postwar Marshall Plan, which economically rebuilt Western Europe. Moreover, the situation eliminated the independent activity of individuals and professional groups, technological progress, and the development of the social life institutions necessary for the functioning of modern states. All these events and political phenomena of the last two centuries fundamentally – and negatively – affected the social life in Poland. Consequently, they determined the issues of literature, its themes, and the construction of the depicted world – including the types of characters, the geography of places, and the construction of events and conversations. The situation also influenced various artistic concepts, the roles of writers and readers, and the periodization of literature.

The Periodization of Twentieth-Century Polish Literature to Date

The periodization pattern of twentieth-century Polish literature has remained unchanged for decades, and relies on distinguishing several major epochs, also called periods. Their beginning and end dates are, of course, conventional, but accepted by all researchers. Each of these epochs (periods) comprises shorter subperiods, distinguished either by the dates of historical events or, less frequently, by the dates of new literary phenomena. Significantly, the historical dates enjoy general acceptance among Polish literary historians, while the literary events are considered interpretive constructs of individual researchers, variable depending on the criteria adopted. These are the following periods.

Young Poland (1890–1918)

Young Poland is the only period of twentieth-century Polish literature whose name derives from an art movement. The other epoch names belong to the language of political history, but there was no Polish state during Young Poland. The initial date of this literary era marks no literary event; actually, we could move it several years backward (for example, 1887) or forward (1895). The choice of 1890 stems from the fact that this year saw the first poetic works announcing a new type of literature. Initially, this new literature was simply called the New Art, and then new terms emerged, such as modernism or Young Poland.2 The end date (1918) is also movable and unrelated to any literary event which could serve as the period’s last chord. However, some scholars believe that Young Poland quit in 1914, with the beginning of the First World War. After all, the following years, 1914–1918, the time of war, actually ended the development of artistic movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Still other literary historians claim that Young Poland actually ended as early as 1910, and after that year, the observed phenomena remained epigonic, transitional, or closer to the next era, such as expressionism.

These internal divisions and different periodizations depend on the viewpoint, but they undoubtedly generate numerous interpretative problems, since the years 1910/1914–1918 are left “without assignment”: Young Poland seems to have already ended, but the next epoch has not yet begun.3 Therefore, most literary historians believe that the date 1918 remains the most convenient for concluding the literature of the Young Poland era. In fact, however, this date (1918/1919) marks the beginning of the new period’s literature.

A more fundamental periodization problem concerns the place of Young Poland in the totality of Polish literature of the last two centuries. Most literary historians consider this period as the beginning of modern twentieth-century Polish literature. However, some argue that Young Poland actually constitutes the closure of nineteenth-century literature. These two distinct views are not contradictory, of course, as they result from different historical perspectives.4 After all, every epoch brings phenomena that conclude the previous epoch and those that foreshadow the next one. Nevertheless, for the description of modernism in Poland, this issue is crucial.

The Interwar Period, or the Second Polish Republic (1919–1939)

This is the only period in the history of Polish literature whose beginning and end dates raise no doubt, and are defined down to the day of the month. November 11, 1918 marks the conventional date of the independent Polish state’s resurrection, while September 1, 1939 (in Western and Central Poland) and September 17, 1939 (in Eastern Poland) are the dates of its new occupation by the Third Reich and the USSR. However, the accuracy of this period’s name provokes debate. At first glance, it seems completely neutral and simply means: “the twenty years between the First and the Second World War.” Still, critics claim that the communist authorities created this name after 1945 for propaganda purposes – only to avoid using the name “the Second Polish Republic,” referring to a Polish state independent of the USSR. Indeed, the term “interwar period” remains political in nature and belongs neither to the language of literary history nor to the terminology of the state’s history. And although its neutrality today is unlikely to offend anyone, the term “the Second Polish Republic’s literature” appears more frequently. Of course, general historians’ precision in defining the timeframe of historical periods is of little importance to literary historians, but the latter nevertheless accept this periodization as the most convenient.

The criteria for distinguishing this period external to literature show in stark terms why historians of twentieth-century Polish literature endorse this division. The periodization of Western literatures seems soft, fluid, and often vague. In Polish literature, this “softness” is also characteristic of marking caesuras, for example, between Positivism and Young Poland. Meanwhile, since 1918, the periodization criteria have a sharp, abrupt character – because the artistic currents and thematic dominants of literature changed alongside the basic determinants of the whole state’s functioning: the political system, its geographical shape (borders), and the institutions of cultural and public life.

After 1918, the Polish territories parceled out in 1795 in three different partitions merged and created a unified administrative structure in areas that belonged to different political, linguistic, religious, and ethnic – that is, cultural and civilizational – systems for 123 years. A new unified cultural circulation appeared, and the political censorship ceased in the former areas of the partitioned states. Moreover, the situation changed the basic relationship of social awareness, namely the relationship between citizens and the state: since November 1918, “the state” means the Polish administration and law, and not the administrative and legal systems of Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

In 1939, none of the modernist trends was complete, as they all enjoyed the peak of their development – each of them in a different way, depending on the differences in the writers’ artistic activity. Some had reached the stage of full artistic maturity (e.g. Leopold Staff, Wacław Berent, Witkacy), some were just entering the period of such maturity (Julian Przyboś, Aleksander Wat, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz), and others were only making their debut (Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Józef Czechowicz, Bruno Schulz, Gustaw Herling).

The Second World War (1939–1945)

Polish writing has long included the term “wartime and occupation literature.” The term indicates the transitional nature of this period, the suspension between the literature of the Second Polish Republic and the literature of the People’s Republic of Poland.

But why do literary historians distinguish this period at all? For the same reasons as they did the previous period: during the war, Polish literature once again found itself in radically new historical conditions. Jerzy Święch perfectly describes these issues.5 In 1939, the Third Reich and the USSR occupied the territory of the Polish state, eradicating all institutions of public life – administrative, cultural, and educational. The country’s borders changed, the life achievements of many generations crumbled, and hundreds of thousands of people died or were forced to emigrate. Secret structures of literary life emerged, becoming part of the Polish Underground State (PPP). Above all, the Polish society’s existential and historical experience became dramatically split, as the country faced a division again, with the Western part annexed to the German zone of occupation and the Eastern part to the Soviet one. This division proved crucial to the development of social awareness and literature after 1945. Scholars assume that this period closed with the war’s end (May 8, 1945), when the communist regime began to form in Poland within the country’s new geographical borders. The literary-historical works display similar issues as in the case of Young Poland. Despite the period’s distinctiveness, caused by the political situation, some historians include its oeuvre in the Second Polish Republic’s literature, while others see it as a prelude to postwar literature.

Polish People’s Republic (PRL: 1945–1990)

Scholars mention four dates as the formal beginning of this period:

July 22, 1944. In the spring and summer of 1944, Soviet troops drove German troops out of the Eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic and re-entered the country. In July of that year, Stalin created an informal Polish government, and on July 22, 1944, in Chełmno Lubelskie, this government announced a program declaration written in Moscow, called the Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (the PKWN Manifesto). From that moment on, we speak of the so-called Lublin government, which considered the PKWN Manifesto as its informal constitution. Importantly, the date of July 22, 1944 remained an official state holiday of the Polish People’s Republic until 1990.

July 7, 1945, when the Allies withdrew their recognition of the Polish government-in-exile in London. This equaled acceptance of the communist government – first the Lublin government, and then the Warsaw government.

1947 – the year of the first postwar parliamentary elections (rigged by the communists). They legalized the rule of the Communist Party in Poland.

1952 – the year of two important political events. First, the authorities passed a new constitution, known as the Stalinist constitution and amended only in 1997. Second, they introduced the name of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). Although the name PRL only entered into force in 1952, it commonly serves to describe the entire post-1945 period.

However, the beginning of communist literature coincides with none of these dates, although 1945 is conventionally accepted as the onset of the communist regime. Scholars link the actual beginning of this literary period to two other dates: September 1939 and January 1949. Why?

When Soviet troops occupied the Eastern territories of the Second Polish Republic, the writers who stayed there, mainly in Lviv and Vilnius, were forced to write works modeled on Stalinist propaganda. After the end of the war, in 1945–1948, the sphere of literature remained relatively liberal in Poland. In January 1949, the communist authorities announced that the only state-tolerated way of practicing art would be socialist realism – a continuation of the propaganda work that many Polish writers had already encountered during the 1939 Soviet occupation of Lviv and Vilnius. The beginnings of the socialist realist trend in the literature of the Polish People’s Republic undoubtedly predate the establishment of the PRL as a state.

After 1945, the existing writing environment changed radically: many writers were killed during the war, and many remained in exile. Some of them experienced only one occupation – German or Soviet – during the war, depending on their location, while others experienced both. Still others spent most of their time outside Poland (Teodor Parnicki). These experiences had a major impact on their postwar work and life attitude. Those who lived under the Soviet occupation or in exile referred to the PRL negatively. Those who stayed in or returned to Poland (Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Julian Tuwim, Antoni Słonimski, Aleksander Wat) participated in the new political system either with fanaticism or bad faith – that is, despite refusing to accept the system, they actually legitimized its functioning. Some writers knew only the Soviet concentration camps, others only the German ones. This situation led to self-censorship, beside the state censorship, and to new taboos. In addition to writers who remembered the Second Polish Republic from personal experience, there were young writers whose attitude to the prewar Polish state coincided entirely with the line of communist propaganda in the early 1950s (Wiktor Woroszylski, Andrzej Mandalian, Leszek Kołakowski).

The writers’ community was also divided because of political involvement during the war – participation in the Home Army, the National Armed Forces, the Peasant Battalions, or the military communist structures of the People’s Army. Other divisive factors in the literary milieu included attitudes toward the USSR, the Warsaw Uprising, border changes, wartime emigration, the communist system, and the Catholic Church. All these factors, and especially the exacerbating ideologization of the state, which de facto became a secular confessional state – with Marxism–Leninism as the prevailing religion – led to the radicalization of worldview conflicts.

Periodization of the Polish People’s Republic’s Literature

Scholars outline the following periods in the literature of communist Poland:

1945–1948 – the period of relative liberalism and pluralism in culture.

1949–1955 – socialist realism (Stalinism). Continuation of terror in political life: eradication of the independence underground and extermination of the “cursed soldiers”; strict censorship of publications: the party dictates what authors can write and how. Although some researchers believe that the “earlier literary phenomena which announced socialist realism remain difficult to indicate,” this is not an accurate statement.6 For example, even before socialist realism ensued, Poland saw ideological tendencies in publications associated with the prewar Communist Party of Poland (KPP) and the milieu of communist sympathizers in the USSR, which Wat describes in My Century. The Sovietization of public life, including literary life, spread in the territories of the Second Polish Republic annexed to the USSR after September 17, 1939. But the decisive factor was the seizure of power in Poland by the communists. Without the incorporation of Poland into the Soviet bloc, socialist realism as the only and obligatory form of cultural activity in Poland would not have become possible.

1956–1968/1970 – the first date marks the Thaw, a name appearing in the title of Ilja Erenburg’s novel. The Thaw encompassed numerous phenomena, such as liberalization in political life and the loosening of censorship, many intellectuals becoming increasingly critical of the Communist Party, or the first attempts at independence. Literature and scientific humanities began to flourish, including the formation of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas, the debuts of outstanding writers, numerous translations from Western literature, reissues of prewar Polish works banned after 1945, and fundamental works on the history of philosophy and the history of ideas (Bronisław Baczko, Leszek Kołakowski, Krzysztof Pomian), history (Witold Kula), art history (Jan Białostocki), literary studies (Polish structuralism), and many others. There were no prescriptions, but censorship in the form of bans on specific topics, names, titles, or types of work remained in place. This subperiod has two end dates. The year 1968 saw student strikes and the communist authorities’ anti-Semitic campaign, which caused thousands of Poles of Jewish origin to leave Poland. Those included many writers (Stanisław Wygodzki, Arnold Słucki), some of whom previously contributed to the construction of the Stalinist system in Poland. Also, workers’ strikes broke out in Gdańsk and Gdynia, but the Communist Party suppressed them bloodily. In 1970, a change of power – but not of regime – took place in Poland.

1970–1976 – new liberalization and invigoration in all areas of social life. A new literary generation called Generation 68 or New Wave appeared, beside the student movement “Young Culture.” These phenomena were analogous, mutatis mutandis, to the counterculture movements in the West. In 1976, the brief period of economic prosperity brought by numerous Western loans concluded, and turbulent workers’ strikes broke out in Radom and Ursus, followed by brutal repression.

1976–1989 – this period saw the first official, albeit illegal, political opposition to the communist authorities since 1948 – the liquidation of the Polish Peasant Party (PSL). The milieu included such groups as the Student Solidarity Committee (SKS), the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), the Movement for Defence of Human and Civic Rights (ROPCiO), the Young Poland Movement (RMP), or the Polish Independence Alliance (PPN). This also marked the beginning of the underground publishing circuit, which functioned independently of state censorship and radically changed Polish literary life. We observe gradual – and, from another perspective, rapid – changes in social consciousness: the evolution of language, the breaking of political taboos, the inclusion of émigré literature in the consciousness of domestic readers, and the change of tastes, knowledge, orientation, information, and the evaluation criteria for writing and art. Literary life became polarized by two separate literary circuits, the official and unofficial one. The heyday of the independent publishing movement occurred in the 1980s, spanning the period of Solidarity’s legal activity (September 1980–December 12, 1981). Paradoxically, the heyday continued during the martial law, introduced on December 13, 1981, and formally lifted in 1983 – although its actual end was the re-legalization of Solidarity in the fall of 1989. Consequently, the decade from the imposition of martial law until the abolition of censorship in the spring of 1990 is referred to as the “period of martial law.”

The Third Polish Republic

Despite numerous studies, textbooks, and critical literature, this period has not yet lived to see a systematic scholarly description. Poland underwent a radical political change, known as the “regaining of independence,” namely the transition from a mono-party system to political pluralism and a free market, free elections, and the departure of the Soviet army from Poland. Still, scholars widely believe that the caesura of 1989 caused no fundamental changes in literature comparable to those that happened after the regaining of independence in 1918. However, we can indicate the following as undoubted markers of change in culture after 1989: the abolition of preventive censorship after half a century of its existence in Poland; the free market for magazines and publishing houses; the “disappearance of the headquarters” – a term coined by Janusz Sławiński to denote the elimination of the administrative corset and the resulting stimulation of the local communities’ cultural activity; the disintegration of artistic hierarchies typical of the Polish People’s Republic, closely linked to institutions dependent on the authorities of the time; the elimination of the administratively controlled division into émigré and domestic literature, resulting in the publishing merge of the two oeuvres; the actual disappearance of émigré institutions; Polish cultural life’s opening to the ideas and phenomena of Western culture, comparable to the changes in 1956; and Poland’s membership in the European Union (2004) and the consequences of this fact in all sectors of public life and for every citizen, such as the opening of borders under the Schengen Treaty. However, the biggest civilizational change after 1989 was the appearance of digital-based devices on a massive scale, and the emergence and increasingly widespread access to the Internet and mobile devices.

Consequences

The most important consequence of such periodization is that in any synthetic description of twentieth-century Polish literature, the fundamental question is “when?,” namely the period of writing a work. Issues such as poetics, ideas, reception, or contexts become secondary matters. This does not mean that literary historians always start their work with this question; sometimes they do not even formulate it directly at all. The point is that periodization based on literary epochs and periods is taken for granted and steers all the interpretative activities of twentieth-century Polish literature researchers from a hidden position.

Another aspect, which also implicitly guides the interpretations of Polish literature, is the question “where” the author created and published a work. Here the answer proves simpler, for writers worked either in exile, where no censorship existed, or in the Polish People’s Republic, where state censorship functioned and where every author had to apply self-censorship. Variants of these questions concern the literature written after 1976: did the author publish the work in the state-censored or underground circulation? Did they write the work with the intention of its immediate release in the underground circulation or in exile, or did the work find its way into the underground circulation after its rejection by the state publishers?

In literary-historical descriptions, these two questions – namely “when” and “where” the author wrote the work – always preceded the question “what” the work is, and determined all explanations, even if researchers did not pose those questions directly.

The dominance of “period-based” thinking in Polish twentieth-century literary history manifests itself in institutional divisions, studies, or scientific specializations. In most academic institutions dedicated to Polish studies, the chairs, departments, and institutes of Young Poland exist separately from those devoted to the literature of the Second Polish Republic or the Polish People’s Republic. The literary-historical units in university and school textbooks, doctoral and habilitation theses, dissertations, and monographs remain periods and epochs almost without exception. An example of such methodology is the monumental series Obraz Literatury Polskiej (The Image of Polish Literature), which divides twentieth-century Polish literature into “images” of individual periods. The work serves as a “mother series,” because many smaller syntheses duplicate its composition. The best proof is the so-called small and large university history of Polish literature, which divides twentieth-century literature into identical subperiods: Young Poland, the 1920s, and so on. This division constitutes the main impediment to writing a history of twentieth-century Polish literature as a whole.

In brief, within the research perspective that dominates the study of the history of twentieth-century Polish literature, scholars consider the division into periods and subperiods – and within them into currents, trends, or groups – as fundamental. These divisions are too rigid, because individual phenomena either had an earlier genesis or continued after the end of a period. Still, questions about the continuity of twentieth-century Polish literature have omitted synthetic works; they tend to appear in essays or literary criticism, or as glosses to detailed period analyses.

Nevertheless, the division of Polish literature into periods remains justified and will undoubtedly persist in the knowledge of twentieth-century Polish literature, as it simply corresponds with the history of Poland in this century. Moreover, such division is not specifically Polish or Eastern European: the history of literature – and art in the West – eagerly uses periodization, with the calendar decade as the basic unit. Virtually all the twentieth-century culture has been divided into decades, with some of them gaining special importance, such as the 1930s, 1940s, or 1960s. However, the periodization by decades fulfills a complementary function and does not replace the typological description of artistic phenomena. In Poland, the case is different: the perspective of dividing literature into periods definitely dominates over others.

My point is that this perspective has become insufficient and requires a new, complementary view. In other words, the history of twentieth-century Polish literature needs rewriting. Without invalidating the previous divisions into periods and subperiods, we must discover the determinants of its continuity beyond these divisions. In my opinion, the category of modernism constitutes a proposal for constructing such continuity. First, however, I would like to justify why the existing divisions prove too rigid, insufficient, and problematic.

The fundamental impediment posed by such periodization is the fragmentation of individual writers’ work into radically separate literary-historical periods.

Many writers who debuted during the period of Young Poland continued writing in the Second Polish Republic, and some during the war and even the communist period. This is even more true for those who debuted in the Second Polish Republic, and continued writing during the Polish People’s Republic and even the Third Polish Republic. Another variant is the work of writers who spent part of their lives in exile – for example, they returned to Poland several years after the war’s end or went into exile after spending one or more decades in the PRL. Meanwhile, in literary-historical descriptions, their work belongs primarily to particular periods. In such an approach, scholars describe those writers’ oeuvre either within those periods or from the perspective of the changes that the subsequent periods caused in their work. Below, I provide examples of writers whose literary activity spanned several periods.

Authors who wrote during the period of Young Poland and the Second Polish Republic, including the Second World War:

Details

Pages
572
Publication Year
2025
ISBN (PDF)
9783631940112
ISBN (ePUB)
9783631940686
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783631913840
DOI
10.3726/b23046
Language
English
Publication date
2025 (December)
Keywords
Twentieth-century Polish literature Eastern European Modernism Modernism Modernity in Polish literature
Published
Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, New York, Oxford, 2025. 572 pp.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Włodzimierz Bolecki (Author)

Włodzimierz Bolecki is Professor Emeritus of Polish Literature who specializes in historical poetics, twentieth-century literary history, Polish émigré literature, theory and history of narrative forms, intertextuality, literary communication, methodology of literary studies, modernism, and postmodernism.

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Title: Modalities of Polish Modernism