Polish Literature and National Identity: A Postcolonial Perspective by Dariusz Skórczewski (review)

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

William Faulkner

After the death of Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859), the Polish national poet and one of Poland's Three Bards (together with Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki), his fellow Romantic lyricist, also a painter, Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–1883) wrote a letter containing a sentence that later became a famous and included the painfully relevant maxim: "We can only argue or love but we are not able to differ beautifully and strongly." This apothegm accompanied me from the start as I read the book by Dariusz Skórczewski, an associate professor of Polish literature at the Catholic University of Lublin. Speaking from a strong ideological position of Christian personalism about East-Central Europe, a region still new to postcolonial studies, the author presents a clear and consequential vision of Polish literature and demonstrates rhetorical passion, which is so infrequent in academia. Engaging and original, Skórczewski's publication may stir some controversy, as it is surely one of the most thought-provoking projects in Polish studies available in English that you will have the pleasure to read this year. In this review, I will present the author's unique perspective and some of the reasons that one could disagree with his vision, but also why Polish Literature and National Identity: A Postcolonial Perspective is a must for enthusiasts of all things Polish.

Divided into eleven chapters and an afterword, the book consists of three thematic parts. In the first part (chapters 1–4) the author discusses the theoretical issues related to postcolonialism in Poland and East-Central Europe. Among these topics are the significance of Christian personalism for postcolonial studies and its connections with Marxism, the history of discourse in the Polish context (from the partitions by Russia, Prussia, and Austro-Hungary in the eighteenth century to the communist period and dependence on the USSR in 1945–1989), the question of identity and West/East opposition, and the positionality of the intelligentsia in the situation of dependence. In the second part (chapters 5–8) Skórczewski focuses on the representations of Self and Other in concrete examples from Polish literature (work by Witold Gombrowicz, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Paweł Huelle, and Andrzej Stasiuk). The final section (chapters 9–11) concerns the postcolonial identity of Poles, especially as viewed in the texts of Anglo-American academics.

Skórczewski begins with the history of postcolonial studies in Poland that originated in the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s. The first Polish translation of Edward Said's Orientalism (1991) did not attract much attention. The author registers a serious interest toward the topic among Polish academics with the switch of focus to Central and Eastern Europe, more precisely with Ewa Thompson's Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism (2000). Initially, Polish academics were skeptical about the postcolonial approach. On one hand, postcolonialism was perceived as "another oddity of Western culture" but on the other hand, especially among some younger scholars, it also "tasted of something exotic" (P. 1). Distrust in the method was partially caused by what the author himself views as a matter of legitimate concern, namely, the danger of framing Polish experience in postcolonial terms as a way to "simply rename, or rebrand, existing categories of analysis, as suggested by research into communism and totalitarianism" (Pp. 2–3). A productive application of the postcolonial approach entailed a focus on historical situations of dependence, such as the periods of partitions and communist rule in Polish history, and Skórzewski duly concentrates on these periods in his analysis. He believes that the postcolonial approach in studies of East-Central Europe is not only refreshing but also necessary, because it allows one to go beyond studies of totalitarianism, communism, and postcommunism. It offers a perspective on the region from the vantage point of the "cultural and mental effects...