Suchergebnisse

The heritage of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of the most problematic residues of the Polish past. After World War II, Poland lost its so-called Eastern Borderlands, which meant a break with a specific state tradition, the most important link of which was the powerful Polish-Lithuanian state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The potential and significance of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remains an important topic of Polish identity discourse. One of the issues addressed in that context is the imperial character of that state. The importance of this issue goes beyond the space of historiographic debates. It also concerns the place and role of Poland in the world from both historical and contemporary perspective. A common element of various narratives around the national-state status is myth. Myth is a story told for the needs of a specific social group, but it also refers to some of the supra-class conditions that could be described as the ontology of national being. Thanks to this, it can be treated as one of the tools used to study not only self-perceptions of the community, but also the interactions that occur between these self-images and real determinants of the community's status. According to the author of the article, postcolonial studies create a possibility of integrated research on Polish imperiality, since they combine a number of different competencies necessary to comprehensively cover this broad topic. The sphere of national mythology is combined from a postcolonial perspective with a vast sphere of social facts and real-life conditions.

The development of postcolonial studies as a research discipline to a large extent depends on their representatives' ability to overcome their own post-colonial conditions. This particularly applies to researchers representing imperial cultures. Russian post-colonial studies develop their own cognitive categories in relation to the issue of Russian and Soviet imperialism, while avoiding many potential inspirations contained in the book by Ewa Thompson "Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism", which became an important reference for postcolonial research in Poland and Ukraine. The author of the article outlines the shaping of Russian literaturocentrism, and then, tries to answer the question of whether and to what extent it can be a useful issue for research on the imperial determinants of Russian culture.

A characteristic feature of Polish-Russian mutual perception is binarity, manifesting itself in various discursive spaces, from colloquial stereotypes, through popular literature, to sophisticated forms of meta-historical discourse. Asian-Europeanness, Latin-Byzantism/Orthodoxy, collectivism-individualism, and authenticity-falsehood, are just some of the oppositions that organise the social imagination of Poles and Russians in the sphere of their mutual assessments and opinions. The article draws attention to the partial manifestations of such oppositions (literary discourse, postcolonial studies, etc.) in order to show their hidden, dialectical dimension. To achieve this goal, the author refers to the category of ratio and emotum, which refers to a specific current of the European philosophical tradition. Both of these binary categories are the foundation for creating an image of the Other. They also fit into self-defining strategies important for understanding Polish and Russian identity. ; A characteristic feature of Polish-Russian mutual perception is binarity, manifesting itself in various discursive spaces, from colloquial stereotypes, through popular literature, to sophisticated forms of meta-historical discourse. Asian-Europeanness, Latin-Byzantism/Orthodoxy, collectivism-individualism, and authenticity-falsehood, are just some of the oppositions that organise the social imagination of Poles and Russians in the sphere of their mutual assessments and opinions. The article draws attention to the partial manifestations of such oppositions (literary discourse, postcolonial studies, etc.) in order to show their hidden, dialectical dimension. To achieve this goal, the author refers to the category of ratio and emotum, which refers to a specific current of the European philosophical tradition. Both of these binary categories are the foundation for creating an image of the Other. They also fit into self-defining strategies important for understanding Polish and Russian identity.

The article shows (post)Sarmatism as an element of the Polish identity discourse in its community dimension, which mainly takes account of its civilisation and cultural aspect, defined by relations with (post)modernity. Although this discourse includes (post)Sarmatism in reflection on the key determinants of collective identity, such as community, Polishness and so on, it generally does so in a simplified manner, not free from prejudices and excessive bias. Liberal thought, which should have the greatest share in shaping the sphere of self-ideas of (post)modern society, shows a clear reluctance towards Sarmatian heritage, which is hardly surprising given its Enlightenment origin. However, one should understand the reasons for this reluctance, taking into account its stricter context, which is determined by the mechanism of programming Polish cultural projects in essentialist codes. Meanwhile, according to the author, the 'post-mortem' history of Sarmatism (nineteenth–twenty–first centuries) is part of the pan-European struggle of Tradition and modernity. When set on this plane, (post)Sarmatism can be considered in terms of lack (discontinuation of a specific tradition) and compensation (attempts to work through modernising deficits). The Sarmatian heritage, torn out of the vicious circle of stereotypes, myths and silences, should now be included in the debate on the foundations of Polish civic culture, because it belongs to the contingent (in the liberal sense) history of the Polish habitus, and it is also characterised by the syndrome of un-working (not being discussed in contexts important from the point of view of the struggle of Polish consciousness with what is broadly understood as modernity). It also needs to be made real by being located in the circle of geopolitical discourse. The perspective of the recontextualisation of Sarmatism, which neo-Sarmatism with its essentialist-nostalgic poetics has created in contemporary identity discourse and postcolonial thought with its binary schemas, seems insufficient.

The article is an attempt at presenting the works of Jerzy Pilch in the context of a literature-centric tradition according to which a writer enjoys a privileged position in a culture. This allows him/her to speak about the world and him/herself from the viewpoint of a finder of truth, a depositor of universal values. In the culturally altered reality of the last few decades, a writer affected by the literature-centric tradition needs to look for various forms of compensating for lost status. A case in point is Jerzy Pilch, whose most elaborate style, combined with mythologizing his own biography, are a tool for "coping" with the generally lower standards of culture. The inconsistencies and incoherence of the writer's auto-creation, their spectral nature, reminiscent ofDerrida's philosophy, reveal the genuine dimension of the struggle with modernity faced by Pilch the traditionalist.