Article(electronic)#1June 12, 2017
The Literary "No" to Politically Tabooed Topics during the Polish People's Republic. The Case of Tadeusz Konwicki's Prose Writing
In: Miscellanea posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia, Volume 5, p. 91-102
Using the example of characteristic works by Tadeusz Konwicki, one of the main post-war Polish writers, the article discusses literary ways of taking up topics functioning in the Polish People's Republic as political taboos. War and post-war relations with the Soviet Union, the fate of Polish inhabitants of the eastern borderlands, the motif of the Home Army struggle against the Soviet army altogether constituted a proscribed area of interest. The analysis shows how the literary resistance against silencing, expressed through allusions, understatements, the poetics of traumatic realism and the grotesque — makes the writer an agent of collective memory.
