The notions of Central Europe and East-Central Europe (in opposition to Naumann’s Mitteleuropa), as well as Europe médiane, have replaced after the fall of Communism the term Eastern Europe, which was in universal use since the war. The metaphors offered by Miłosz, Kundera, and Braudel inspired the studious historical works of Halecki, Kłoczowski, Wandycz, Bibó and Szűcs, and Snyder, which, in turn, have revealed from their longue durée point of view a cohesiveness in the structures and identities of nations situated “between Germany and Russia;” the three historical kingdoms of Bohemia, Hungary, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The distinctive identity of this region was expressed in the nineteenth century under the influence of Herder’s philosophy and Romantic poetry, by the figure of a “national poet” and the idea of “cultural nationhood,” which was distinct from the “nation state” associated with the Enlightenment paradigm. National “culture canons” and the “paradigmatic” type of identity of these countries were the result of specific cultural patterns. Meanwhile, a positional (“syntagmatic”) type of identity prevailed in bourgeois Western states. The transformation of countries after the fall of Communism, the political liberalization and pluralization of opinion, as well as the lack of a clear identity discourse in the West, have to some extent inspired the evolution towards politics of memory – an affirmation of the “paradigmatic” identity, which is not necessarily well suited for the conditions of modernity. 

The article In the Mirror of Literature. The Czech–Polish Central European Myth and Its Transformations is an attempt to outline the transformations of the Central European myth, which consists of the Habsburg myth and its transformations expressed in the works of Austromodernists after 1918; the revival of the Central European myth, which took place after the Second World War and was connected with the post-totalitarian regime introduced in the countries belonging to the Soviet bloc; and the posttransformation period – from the 1990s to the present. The comparative juxtaposition of Polish and Czech literature allows us to trace the development, transformation, and silencing of the myth of Central Europe, which at the same time expresses the identity problems of both nations.

This paper traces the evolution of the notion of Europe in Czesław Miłosz’s Native Realm. The author points to the antinomy in the image of East and West noticeable at the start of the work and argues that this dichotomy is gradually surpassed by the speaking subject. In the final pages of Native RealmMiłosz gives a definition of the Old Continent as a cultural whole. According to the author, the Polish Nobel Laurate is inspired by the work and ideas of Stanisław Vincenz (expressed, for example, in the essay Krajobraz jako tło dziejów [Lanscape as historical background]).

The article presents an analysis of one of Zygmunt Haupt’s text – unpublished during the author’s lifetime – which grapples with the issue of identity of a Polish writer who settled in the United States. The artist’s exile self-awareness is determined by the spatiotemporal conceptual oppositions typical for the émigré condition: “here” and “there,” “now” and “then.” An additional, original element of Hauptian discourse is the metaphor of the “praił” [primordial clay] that he uses to describe the foundation of the long-established self-awareness that is confronted with the ubiquitous otherness. The analysis also encompasses the writer’s literary output and unpublished archival materials.

This article proposes a reading of Dzienniki [Diaries] by Stefan Kisielewski (1911– 1991) as a counter-hegemonic narrative. The author of this article explores the question of the strategy that Kisielewski adopts (consciously or not) in response to the conditions in which he finds himself as a writer and publicist – that is, the textual strategy (devised for the purposes of a specific work, his diary) and the life strategy. The principal element in the strategy employed by the writer is his embrace of the role of a jester – a commentator of reality, who finds pleasure in the rhetorical advantage granted by categories such as: joke, ridicule, irony, and self-mockery. This attitude allows one to attain a distance to both the world and other people, which guarantees safety and also helps sidestep most of the dangers associated with placing too much confidence in reason. The jester mask precludes dogmatism, prevents devoting oneself completely to the pragmatism of fighting an enemy, and allows maintaining individual autonomy in an oppressive world.

The author analyses the image of contemporary Central Europe depicted by Ziemowit Szczerek as an area of continuous interplay between the centre and the periphery. Dissolution, chaos, and mythomania not only seem to indicate the nature of national communities, but also appear to be the reason behind the impossibility of realizing the idea of unification. The questions about the status of Szczerek’s statements, which balance between analytical diagnosis and literary narrative based on constructs of the imagination, are also vital for these considerations.

Marjorie Perloff, Ostrze ironii. Modernizm w cieniu monarchii habsburskiej, transl. M. Płaza, Wydawnictwo Ossolineum, Wrocław 2018, pp. 344.

Alois Woldan, Studia galicyjskie, transl. J. Dąbrowski, J. Krzysztoforska-Doschek, Universitas, Kraków 2019, pp. 316

Jiří Gruša, Czechy. Instrukcja obsługi, transl.A.S. Jagodziński, Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, Kraków 2018, pp. 298