Borderland, in other words: Polishness

The article outlines the history of Polish culture, underlining its borderland nature, while also showing the thematic connection occurring between the essays that follow it. It invokes a variety of examples of artists to whom an adjective „Polish” does not quite fit, although the language of their work was the Polish language. It indicates „borderlandness” as a typical Polish trait.
 

Multi-Literacy in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: A New Research Approach

The paper deals with the problem of using different languages of writing in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 15th–17th centuries. Among them there were: Latin, ­Polish, Ruthenian, Church-Slavonic, Lithuanian, German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, written in five alphabets: Latin, Cyryllic, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek. The author noticed that this multi-lingualism and multi-alphabeticism was omitted in Polish studies about history of literature of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He argues that including these two issues in the studies on the Commonwealth’s history is crucial to better understand the muli-cultural and multi-ethnic character of this country. One of the main questions of the paper is about the relationship between a script and an identity. The author notices that comparative approach can be especially productive in such research. He enlists similar borderline processes in use of writing in medieval and early modern England, Sicily, Malta, Cyprus, Venice, Dubrovnik, Moldova and Andalusia. It is illustrated by a few cases of use of the Cyryllic, Latin and Arabic alphabets. The author draws a comparison between the 16th-century literary languages of Spanish Moriscos and Lithuanian Tatars. Both these languages were based on the written version of a vernacular language (Romance and Byelorussian) in the Arabic alphabet.
 

Mercenaries in the armies in the 17th century and their role in shaping the peoples of Europe

The aim of this paper is to describe the changes in the warfare that occurred in the 17th century and to outline their social and political implications. During early modern period in Europe, and specially during Thirty Years’ War, several European countries have shifted away from professional, mercenary-based formations and begun creating standing armies, conscripted from the local population. This resulted in changing of the social perception of warfare, and had great impact on the culture of the entire continent. The figure of a mercenary a professional soldier, who was perceived as a type of craftsman deeply attached to his personal honour, became obsolete, pushing it into the area of marginal identities of contemporary and future society. The paper follows the case studies of mercenaries who served in the middle of the 17th century, both actual and fictional, and presents their lives in typical context of early modern warfare. It also explain possible reasons behind the switch to conscripted standing armies, which were the predecessors of current national armies and have direct impact in creating modern societies.
 

The another history of balagulas from Berdicher

The paper is an attempt to reread the history of Volyn balagulas. In Polish tradition these groups of young gentry decadents flirting with peasants culture are the symbol of lost generation. I would like to remind the forgotten discussion held by 19th century conservative writers who described balagulas movement as the threat to Polish identity.
 

Borderland issues (borderland) in literary works of Gustaw Manteuffel

Gustaw Manteuffel (1832–1916) was Polish-Livonian historiographer whose writing activity focused on the idea of reconstructing the forgotten land called Polish Livonia. In his many texts elaborating almost exclusively on Livonian issues, one can find as well many borderland categories. Livonia he lived in and wrote about was a highly diversified land, both ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. This article, dealing with borderland issues considered in Gustaw Manteuffel’s works, represents the new subdiscipline of contemporary academic studies on the heritage of the Polish-Lithuanian state called Livonian studies.
 

Czesław Miłosz and „The Generation of Columbuses” in Lithuanian Literature. A contribution to one more parallel biography

The main question discussed in the article is: why was it the Lithuanian emigration environment in USA that found Miłosz’s poetry a testimony of the era (de facto – their own experience) during the first decade after the WWII. To answer the question mainly two publications are interpreted: the first one is Miłosz’s poetry volume translated into Lithuanian, entitled Epochos sąmoningumo poezija (Poetry of the Era’s Self-Awareness) with introduction (by Miłosz) and afterword (by a poet Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas); the second one is a Lithuanian literary magazine „Literatūros lankai” („Literary sheets”) where Czesław Miłosz published, and where some interpretations of Miłosz’s works, written by Lithuanian writers and philosophers, were published as well.
 

The Need for Subversiveness in Studies on Borderlands

The word „pogranicze” (in rough translation: borderland) gets more and more popular in Polish humanities as the equivalent of untranslatable and inconvenient „Kresy”, the first being free of polonocentric, colonial conotations of the latter. The article: presents the logic of a map as fundamental to the notion „pogranicze”, discusses its discoursive consequences and points to the need of deconstructive, subversive uses of the term.
 

Catching the Elusive. The Benefits of Borderlands Studies

Borderlands, like the nation, have their space and time, their history, politics, culture and literature – and their contradictory aims. When we wish to say something sensible about borderland literature, sooner or later we must turn to the problem of identity that has been destabilized, lost, or which is stubbornly protected. Borderlands are places of the interaction of cultures, which is not necessarily conflictual, but which is always inscribed into the relationship between the self and the other. The borderlands situation contains a fundamental contradiction: it demands clear identification from the subject, while at the same time making such identification impossible because of the very conditions of multiculturalism. As a result, a text that belongs to borderland literature speaks by means of a series of discourses which comprise a composition (mosaic of discourses), while also registering the conventional and artificial nature of these discourses. Therefore, we can project a borderland history of literature, but it requires different approaches to the text and its new, especially borderland interpretation.
 

Discovery of „polyphonic Vilnius”. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas on the 20th century beginning of Vilnian literature

The author of the review describes Mindaugas Kvietkauskas’ Literature’s polyphony in Vilnius in early stage of modernism in years 1904–1915 paying particular attention to the original and innovative form of interpretation of cross-cultural relationships shaping the multilingual literature of Vilnius at the beginning of the 20th century. Kvietkauskas reaches for texts written in five languages (Lithuanian, Polish, Yiddish, Belarussian and Russian) and argues with the existing approaches by exposing the ethnical individuality of each national literature and undermines the picture of Vilnius at the beginning of the 20th century as being centred around polishness only.
 

After all the monads have the windows, or how to open the literary worlds that look inwards

The author reviews the pioneering work of Mindaugas Kvietkauskas dedicated to multilingual literature, which was created in Vilnius at the beginning of the 20th century. The book of the Lithuanian historian of literature emphasises multicultural and multi-ethnical trait of the early literary modernism in Vilnius that was created in five different languages: Lithuanian, Polish, Yiddish, Belarussian and Russian. It proves that what is the most interesting in the multilingual cultural environment takes place at the crossroads of apparently looking inwards and isolated worlds of different language and different literature.
 

The review describes the anthology Žemaičių šlovė – Sława Żmudzinów. Antologia dwujęzycznej poezji litewsko-polskiej z lat 1794–1830 (Kraków 2012) in edition of P. Bukowiec as a selection of bilingual Lithuanian literature in wider aspect of culture changes in 1794–1830 on Samogitian-Lithuanian land of Russian Empire province.