Kacper Pobłocki

This article is a critical analysis of the novel The Palace by Wieslaw Myśliwski. The author first presents the existing interpretations of this work, and then shows that they lack a description of what is one of the most fundamental elements of the plot: the description of sexual violence by the noblemen against women of both the gentry and peasant social classes. Based on this material, the author argues that The Palace is a compelling analysis of the relationship between class and gender, and in this sense shows Myśliwski’s prose as intersectional. In the very last part of the essay, the author discusses the latest psychological and neurological studies of trauma and shows that they explain not only the content of The Palace but also the unusual form of this novel.

By exploring the cliché that socialist cities are ‘grey’, this paper seeks to employ the anthropology of colour for unravelling the peculiarities of the East European urban experience. By analyzing the oeuvre of Władysław Reymont, I show that greyness in Eastern Europe has a distinct lineage. It is not, like in the West, a colour poised between black and white, but the very opposite of red. I show how greyness emerged as the central trope for narrating Polish agrarian capitalism, and how after 1945 it was moved onto the urban turf. Greyness became salient because it captured the very essence of the contradictions of nascent urban Poland: a blend of freedom and oppression, equality and hierarchy, solemnity and joy. I describe these conflicting meanings of greyness and show how colour suddenly became the fulcrum of the struggle to generate an urban experience beyond capitalism and socialism that would be East European and cosmopolitan at the same time.