Suchergebnisse

A reflection on Dostoevsky's place in post-war Polish literature and science. Constantly present and free from ideological and political pressures in émigré literature, it endured limitations typical of all communist countries, especially in the Stalinist era. The problem of Dostoevsky's attitude towards Poles bothered (and still bothers) contemporary Polish researchers. It is difficult to identify an important author in Polish émigré literature who did not refer to Dostoevsky. The writer appears in various ways in essays (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Czesław Miłosz, Aleksander Wat, Józef Czapski, Józef Wittlin), in diaries (Lechoń, Gombrowicz, Bobkowski, Herling-Grudziński), in fictionalized accounts of Polish prisoners of the Gulag (Stanisław Swianiewicz, Wacław Grubiński), which significantly related to Notes from a Dead House. Dostoevsky returned to the official culture of People's Republic of Poland with the 'rehabilitation' of metaphysical and experimental literature in the late 1950s. But until the fall of communism, Polish Dostoevskyologists had to deal with censorship pressure, with the awareness of possible interference. Nevertheless, the most important achievements of the period of the thirty years 1957-1989 in the reflection on the Russian genius will certainly remain in the Polish humanities forever.Keywords: Dostoevsky in Poland, Polish-Russian literary relationship, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Czesław Miłosz, Witold Gombrowicz, Andrzej Walicki, Ryszard Przybylski, Andrzej de Lazari

The aim of this article is to reflect on the religiosity of Stalinist prisoners shaped by religion or the Christian tradition. A comparison of works of Polish and Russian literature demonstrates that prisoners from the Soviet Union and Poland essentially otherwise referred to the faith, to the Decalogue. Most of the inmates came into the camp from the country's militant atheism, infected with a hostility to religion as "the opium of the masses", and only in the camp were they looking for ways to return to the faith of their fathers. However, they often kept faith in the value of humanity, they represented a secular holiness. A substantial majority of Polish prisoners affirmed their Catholicism, which was not only a witness of their faith, but also synonymous with Polish culture. Such an attitude often hampered relations with the Orthodox and Greek Catholics. A large part of the Polish inmates reluctantly referred to them as Christians of the Eastern Rite, as a consequence of Catholic education in pre-war Poland, but also out of hostility towards Russians and Ukrainians. Many of them, however, disregarded religious issues, they referred to a fellow prisoner with respect, regardless of his religion. They looked at them from the human perspective.