* Praca niniejsza powstała w grupie badawczej prof. dra hab. Jerzego Jarzębskiego w trakcie prac nad projektem „Formy pesymizmu w prozie polskiej po 1985 roku”, subsydiowanym w ramach programu „Mistrz” Fundacji na rzecz Nauki Polskiej.

„The Ritual Murder of a German”. A Few Comments on Andrzej Stasiuk’s „Dojczland”

The subject of the present article is an attempt to interpret Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel entitled Dojczland (Deutschland - Germany) as a book which, on the one hand, seems to be typical of the writer as it continues the poetics of travel style writing, whose best realizations are Stasiuk’s essay Dziennik okrętowy (Ship’s Log) and novels: Jadąc do Babadag (On the Way to Babadag) and Fado, and on the other hand, as a work which undermines this very poetic. For in Dojczland we are dealing with the deconstruction of the very concept of writing about travel – if one assumes that such features, preserved in the tradition of the genre as experiencing, witnessing aiming at trans-cultural communication, fascination with the exoticism of the different and the alien are indeed distinctive of it. In the case of Stasiuk’s novel, the situation is quite different: his description of Germany, as it looms to us from the pages of Dojczland, is in fact a documentation of a certain cognitive and esthetic fiasco. The German travels of the author of Opowieści galicyjskie (Galician Tales) are in reality nothing more than a tautological enumeration of the fantasies associated with the German reality, of successive derivatives of what had already been experienced – in reality presenting the German otherness as its petrified mental picture and by comparing what is different with what is already known, it transforms the exotic into the experience of boredom. The hypothesis with which the author ends his article is the enunciation that maybe it is precisely in this way that Stasiuk carries out a symbolic act of resentful violation of the colonizing discourse of the Western civilization which seems to dominate the Central-European identity.

The subject of the present article is an attempt to interpret Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel entitled Dojczland (Deutschland - Germany) as a book which, on the one hand, seems to be typical of the writer as it continues the poetics of travel style writing, whose best realizations are Stasiuk’s essay Dziennik okrętowy (Ship’s Log) and novels: Jadąc do Babadag (On the Way to Babadag) and Fado, and on the other hand, as a work which undermines this very poetic. For in Dojczland we are dealing with the deconstruction of the very concept of writing about travel – if one assumes that such features, preserved in the tradition of the genre as experiencing, witnessing aiming at trans-cultural communication, fascination with the exoticism of the different and the alien are indeed distinctive of it. In the case of Stasiuk’s novel, the situation is quite different: his description of Germany, as it looms to us from the pages of Dojczland, is in fact a documentation of a certain cognitive and esthetic fiasco. The German travels of the author of Opowieści galicyjskie (Galician Tales) are in reality nothing more than a tautological enumeration of the fantasies associated with the German reality, of successive derivatives of what had already been experienced – in reality presenting the German otherness as its petrified mental picture and by comparing what is different with what is already known, it transforms the exotic into the experience of boredom. The hypothesis with which the author ends his article is the enunciation that maybe it is precisely in this way that Stasiuk carries out a symbolic act of resentful violation of the colonizing discourse of the Western civilization which seems to dominate the Central-European identity.