Mieczysław Wajnberg and the Category of Borderland

Polish musicologist and author Danuta Gwizdalanka, titled her publication Mieczysław Wajnberg: Composer from Three Worlds (Poznań, 2013). Wajnberg (1919–1996) was a Polish composer with Jewish roots who spent most of his life in USSR. Without any doubt, Wajnberg can be named “the composer from the borderland” due to his “hybrid identity”, which was one of the most important reasons preventing appreciation of Wajnberg’s creative activity both during life and after death. The main ideas of the paper are focused on the “category of borderland” and its representation in Wajnberg’s biography and output. According to the typology proposed by Krzysztof Zajas, Wajnberg’s live and works can be considered in the frame of following types of borderland: interdisciplinary, spatial, psychological, existential, sociological and mythological. Through the prism of “borderland’s category”, Wajnberg’s creative activity shows itself as a very individual and invaluable testimony of his times (far away from eclectic and epigonic in relation to music of Dmitri Shostakovich), unique on the scale of world music literature.