The aim of the paper is to interpret Wiesław Myśliwski’s The End of Peasant Culture, with particular emphasis on the issues such as the historical isolation of the peasantry, its nation-building potential, idealization and mythization of the peasant. The writer uses elegiac discourse to formulate his own literary program aimed at restitution of lost elements of traditional culture. The last part of the article contrasts this funeral vin vision with the phenomenon of disco polo, which is the proof for the vitality of peasant culture, reborn in a lowbrow and hybrid form.

This paper analyzes the politics of the Tale of Jakub Szela (Słowo o Jakubie Szeli, 1926) by Bruno Jasieński. The second long poem of the most renowned Polish futurist investigates mechanisms of the mythology of power in the 1920s Poland. Discussing the entanglements of historiography in the power apparatus, one may trace how Jasieński’s work exercises the hegemonic discourse on the Peasant Uprising of 1846 in Galicia, proposing to use this historical event as a positive story about emancipation and the nucleus for the new community. In his poem, Jasieński discusses the suppressing attributes of nationalist historiography and explores possibilities to overcome its hegemonic claims to universalism. From this tension arise Jasieński’s questions about what we should consider common or collectively shared and how unconventional historiography and politics of aesthetics should be used during the struggle for reconfiguring the prevalent ways of being together in social context.

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.

The article sets out to investigate the experience of social advancement in the dissimilation mode, which is contrary to the assimilation. The process of becoming non-identical and affirming one’s distinctiveness is examined in reference to the novel Majdan by Marian Pilot, one of the authors of the so-called peasant current in the Polish literature. The term “rozkraczność” (“straddle-ness”) taken from Pilot’s prose is used to describe the condition of a displaced subject as persistence in a state of ambivalence between heteronomy and autonomy.

The article examines the aspects of the WWII experience of the Polish village and the postwar social advancement of peasants – that are rarely considered in witness narratives – on the examples from Andrzej Stasiuk’s generically hybrid prose writing, treated here as an exemplum. It presents the departure and arrival points of that process, determining today’s condition of the social and cultural consciousness of the descendants of those people who either migrated from the countryside to the cities, or remained in their native villages, living in the Polish People’s Republic, and – later on – facing the system transformation after 1989. The discussion concentrates on three essential problems: the WWII clash of the peasantry from Mazowsze and Podlasie with modernity; their postwar attitude to the revolution which made the migration to the city possible, and the interplay between superiority and inferiority (contempt and shame) in identity constructs of the contemporary Poles with peasant roots.

The aim of the article is to present a collection of rural novels written in recent years (2013–2022). The author adopted the expanded category of “prose of rural spaces,” pointing to its advantages and limitations. Then he lists two basic features of the new rural prose: focus on the past and its seriousness. In the main part, the author refers to two concepts mentioned in the title: escapes and returns. He notes that in new Polish prose we are dealing with escapes from the cities to the countryside, never in the opposite direction. He divides the issue of literary returns to the countryside into several problem clusters. In the most general terms, it is described by literary critics as a new wave of rural literature, which was generally associated with the plebeian (folk) turn that took place in Polish culture in the middle of the second decade of the 21st century. Then – on the example of Andrzej Stasiuk’s prose – he discusses the writer’s private returns to their rural childhoods and presents an original literary project, an anthology collecting stories written by members of the Writers’ Union from the Countryside. The next part of the article discusses the problem of a short-term return to the countryside, treated as a “rehabilitation stay.” The article closes with an interpretation and analysis of three works by Andrzej Muszyński, a writer who has been particularly attached to rural issues for a decade now.

In this article, the author discusses Krystyna Kłosińska’s monograph entitled Neuroza. Zagrożone męskości. In a synthetic approach, the reviewer situates Kłosińska’s latest book in the context of her earlier scientific works and masculinity studies. The author shows that for Krystyna Kłosińska, neurosis is a category that brings together nineteenth-century obsessions; fantasies and internalized fears related to technological development; challenges related to political changes and the capitalist economy. Kłosińska puts the figures of masculinity at the center of her research and interprets them from the perspective of nineteenth-century gender divisions.

The article is a review of Michał Koza’s book Asceza, inność, nomadyzm. O dyskursach etycznych literatury polskiej po 1989 roku [Asceticism, alterity, nomadism. On the ethical discourses of Polish literature after 1989], concerning the ethical and political dimension of the prose of this period.