Kazimierz Adamczyk

The present article is a commentary on Arkadiusz Morawiec’s book Polska literatura obozowa. Rekonesans [Polish Prison and Camp Literature: Preliminary Remarks], in which a convincing hypothesis was presented that a concentration camp should be seen as a symbol of the 20th century. Morawiec illustrates his reflections with the monograph’s chapters on Nazi concentration camps, gulags, as well as Polish, Spanish and Japanese prison camps. In his book, the author postulates broadening the scope of literary and historiographic research on Nazi and Soviet camps to include the internment camps created by the other European regimes as well as the literary works created decades after the Second World War, with inclusion of questionable pop culture works. The author of this article sees this not only as Morawiec’s attempt at redefining the concept of Polish camp literature but also an attempt at re-creating it from scratch in order to showcase new research perspectives. The author emphasises the fact that each of the book’s chapters can be seen as a small monograph describing the camps and their literary representations that serves as a model example of academic humanistic writing. The author’s only point of critique is underrepresentation of the genre’s most well known works. Such literary works have been subjects of numerous studies, nevertheless Polish Prison and Camp Literature would have greatly benefited as monograph from exploring the oeuvre of Tadeusz Borowski, Seweryna Szmaglewska, Stanisław Grzesiuk, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Anatol Krakowiecki, Aleksander Wat in greater detail.

In the article, I discuss novels by ideologists and activists of the inter-war nationalist movement. Popular literature played a significant role in propagation of nationalist ideas. When looking at female characters in novels by Roman Dmowski, Stanisław Piasecki, Władysław Jan Grabski, Adam Doboszyński and Jędrzej Giertych, I indicate the role of stereotype as well as the presence of patriarchal and anti-Semitic discourse in these novels. In works of the young generation of nationalists, one may find more diversified portraits of women, which is connected with progressing emancipation of women in the inter-war period, as well as beginnings of their activity in the nationalist movement. I show the hazards connected with focusing on the feminist discourse without the context of the ideology propagated by these works. Therefore, I pay attention to relationships between the ideological assumptions of the National Radical Camp (ONR) and creation of the presented world in the works under discussion.

In the article, the author presents the disappointment, as recorded in the literary texts of the Solidarity emigration, with the Western world, particularly the USA, the myth of which used to be very persistent in the People’s Republic of Poland as well as in early nineties. One source of this disappointment were the egalitarian ideas shared by the generations that grew up in Communist Poland. As a result, the American experience of authors of the Solidarity emigration has brought a gradual deconstruction of American myths in their artistic output.

The author of the article asks the emigration literature a perverse question concerning the world that it does not present. He references a Polish book by Juliusz Kornhauser and Adam Zagajewski, famous in early 1970s. He enumerates the peculiar “blanks” in this text, the spheres of the American reality that have not been shown in the emigration literature. The reason why they have been ignored was not always the ongoing propaganda warfare in the ideologically divided world of the era.

“Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza” (“The Polish Daily & Soldier’s Daily”), along the “Wiadomości” of London and the Parisian “Kultura”, was the most important periodical of the wartime independence emigration. Although very popular among emigrants, for years it had remained less known to readers in Poland. 2008 finally saw a monograph of this journal by Jolanta Chwastyk-Kowalczyk. Reading of her study Londyński „Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza” 1944–1989. Gazeta codzienna jako środek przekazu kulturowych [London emigration’s “Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza”, 1944–1989. A daily newspaper as a medium of cultural messages] demonstrates the culture-forming role of the journal. The Author recalls tens of names of the newspaper’s collaborators, quotes hundreds of published reviews and discussions of literary works and cultural events. In her approach, a daily newspaper  becomes a record of the intellectual life of the independence emigration. My article is not a review of the book by Jolanta Chwastyk-Kowalczyk. My goal is to complement her study with a topic which has lost much of its distinctness in an enormous number of facts recalled by the author. Namely, I have paid attention to the significance of the Polish-Jewish dialogue which had been developing for many years in the pages of the London-based journal. A person to have a crucial role was Wacław Zagórski, the editor of the “Tydzień Polski” supplement. The name of Józef Lichten, who authored several dozen articles, is not mentioned in the study by the researcher of emigration press at all, the cultural activity of other Polish Jews is not sufficiently emphasized either. The book by Jolanta Chwastyk-Kowalczyk will probably remain the most comprehensive monograph of „Dziennik Polski i Dziennik Żołnierza” for many years, therefore my proposal to researchers of the emigration literature is a kind of supplement, complementing the image of the journal.