Katarzyna Szkaradnik

The article concerns various dimensions of literary recollection of Zaolzie – the part of Cieszyn Silesia conceded to Czechoslovakia in 1920, although the Polish population dominated there. The area still generates the identity problems for inhabitants of Polish origin who feel, on the one hand, forgotten by Poland, and on the other hand – connected with it through the cultural memory. Their lives are easier, whenever they relate to Czech culture, but they are under pressure from the older generation, who oftentimes equate “Polishness” with regionalism and isolationism. Especially men and women of letters feel the weight of patriotic duties, as they therefore take into critical consideration the identity as well as recollect the past – recovering contents wiped from the social memory. The article’s author analyses how writers and poets struggle with Zaolzian taboos, historical traumas, troublesome phantoms and ideologies. In respect to seven types of forgetting detailed by Paul Connerton, she considers three main relations: with Poland, with the divided identity as well as with being locked in the locality.

The author analyses Michał Głowiński’s short story volumes Historia jednej topoli i inne opowieści [The History of One Poplar and Other Stories] and Kładka nad czasem [A Footbridge over Time] as well as a cycle of essays Widoczki z Miasteczka [Views from a Small Town] from Fabuły przerwane [Discontinued Plots] from the point of view of the way in which the writer constructs “little narratives” devoted to his home town. The context is provided by his literature studies works, which help consider questions important for both Głowiński the writer and Głowiński the literary theorist. Thus, the narrative strategies, the problem of mimesis and (re)constructing the past, the role of the social patterns of speaking and intertextual references, the shaping of space through portraying the characters and its symbolic ordering by the flâneur narrator, as well as the tension between the documentary and fiction, representation and trauma, and literary awareness and irreducible individuality are all examined in this light. The author of the essay also points out in what sense the difference between the realistic “mirror carried along a main road” and the “shattered mirror” used by Głowiński corresponds to the difference between “finding the time” and “darning the memory.”

This article’s purpose is to present in what ways a well-known sociologist and humanist Jan Szczepański from Ustroń shapes his biography in private notebooks and essays, including it in some key figures or metaphors. The aim of his efforts seems to situate his own life in view of the irreversible historical time as well as the cycle of vegetation – in other words, to confirm a connection with culture so as not to lose an union with nature and its creative power. A main figure making for mediation between these both spheres in Szczepański’s works is the forest tree. It’s development means an actualization of inborn potency in line with Aristotle’s conception of entelechy. A notion of the tree is associated with the metaphors of roots and land, which refers both to nature and “this land”, namely to cultural region (in Szczepański’s case: his native Cieszyn Silesia). The authoress shows, how this article’s hero – especially in his Diaries – “inscribes” himself in nature’s duration and also intentionally “settles in” the culture in which he grew. In light of his attempts to reconcile historical and cyclical time in his existence as well as to fi nd the raison d’être for it, roots appear not to be a trivial symbol of attachment the place of one’s birth, but the imperative of eff ort of putting down roots in the word, and in that way – in the world of the sense which grants that sense to human’s passing away.