Contemporary Polish Women's Prose
Agnieszka Kosinska
0000-00-00Literary scholars, critics and readers all agree that women dominate contemporary Polish prose.
Being a woman writer in today's Poland still means something completely different from being a male writer, but it also means something completely different from being a woman writer twenty years ago. In remarks to Wislawa Szymborska when she was granted an honorary doctorate by the University of Poznan in 1995, Michal Glowinski, the well-known scholar of language and literature, admitted that "language is constructed in such a way that the privilege of generality has been granted to masculine forms. When I say a great woman poet, I suggest whether I want to or not that she is only the best among the women writing verse." Yet being a woman in today's Poland is not such a bad thing; it means being in the center of attention.
The appearance of interest in literature created by women and in all "feminisms" was a sociological necessity. There is the new face of Western feminism with its twenty years or more of traditions and accomplishments on the one hand, and the vitality of the generation born after 1960, prepared by Polish history for the role of "disobeyed girls," on the other.
The first studies of Polish women's literature have appeared, such as Grazyna Borkowska's Cudzoziemki (Strangers) or Maria Janion's Kobiety i duch innosci (Women and the Spirit of Otherness). Theoretical-literary works based on feminist literary criticism have been published, as have anthologies of classical feminist texts and encyclopaedias: Kronika kobiet (Chronicle of Women) and Encyklopedia drugiej plci (Encyclopaedia of the Second Sex). Established magazines like Literatura na swiecie, Teksty drugie, bruLion, Wiez, Znak, Film na swiecie and Magazyn sztuki have produced special issues on women's literature.
This quick survey shows that the 1990s have been years of a women's boom in Polish culture. Polish women have found many ways to conquer "no-man's land" and follow a "career with a future" - i.e. writing.
Contemporary women's prose is a variegated phenomenon that groups women of different generations, orientations and artistic tastes. Like all of contemporary Polish prose, it is composed of individual phenomena that resist arrangement into currents, tendencies or groups. The only common point is the authors themselves: women telling anew what is around them, sensitive to the existence of Difference and The Other, patiently undermining existing structures and values. Here are some of those individual voices.
Teresa Lubkiewicz-Urbanowicz's late first novel, the extraordinary family saga Boza podszewka (The Lining of God's Coat), offers a headstrong woman and her family among the provincial gentry of the Vilnius region. Izabella Cywinska has recently filmed it.
The crystal-clear prose of Anna Bolecka's Bialy kamien (White Stone) reaches back through the years to the memory of the lost Polish eastern marches and the author's childhood.
Krystyna Kofta has been a popular novelist for at least twenty years. She is the author of such outspoken novels as Wizjer (The Peephole), Cialo niczyje (Nobody's Body), Pawilon Malych Drapiezcow (The Small Carnivore Pavilion), Chwala czarownicom (In Praise of Witches), and the tongue-in-cheek bestseller Jak zdobyc, utrzymac i porzucic mezczyzne (How to Catch, Keep and Ditch a Man). Kofta is also co-author (with Malgorzata Domagalik) of the extended interview Harpie, piranie, anioly (Harpies, Piranhas and Angels) about the domestic, public and social life of the contemporary Polish woman.
Critics have not hesitated to call Jolanta Brach-Czaina's Szczeliny istnienia (Cracks in Existence) "a work of genius". It is hard to think of anything similar in Polish or world literature: an insightful study of the essence of our existence as it abides in objects (a cleaning rag, for instance) and actions (the act of love, cooking meat) "accompanying our efforts at the existential construction of everyday life."
It would be difficult to overrate the novels of the well-known artist (paintings and installations), art historian, poet and essayist Ewa Kuryluk: (The Twenty-First Century) or Grand Hotel Oriental.
Hanna Krall, Agata Tuszynska and Joanna Siedlecka have turned fabular reportage into an art form. Hanna Krall's best-known books, the ones that have touched hearts all over the world - Zdazyc przed Panem Bogiem (Shielding the Flame), Dowody na istnienie (Evidence of Existence) - are seemingly dry accounts of the fates of Jews in the contemporary world. Whether she is recording a "gray" or a "colorful" biography, she avoids intervention in what her subjects say: "After all, we are not writing history. We are writing about remembering."
Magdalena Tulli's Sny i kamienie (Dreams and Stones) is a poetical mini-novel about names, things and phantasmagoria, a treatise about the way a city exists in the consciousness of the contemporary human being. Tulli is interested in the co-existence of stones, things, and the names of things, about the evocation of concrete and mythical cities, and our dreams about those cities where only the stones retain a "constant existence free of names".
The so-called "bruLion generation," born after 1960, has produced such talents as Manuela Gretkowska, Natasza Goerke, and Iza Filipiak. They all made their literary debuts in bruLion, the "most reliable, standard-bearing literary magazine" of the 1990s. With an editorial staff in their twenties and thirties and a deliberate refusal to follow a set program - bold, aggressive, and intellectually provocative - bruLion has prepared the new younger generation (editors and writers as well as readers) for the new situation in which Polish culture finds itself after the transformation - and has also prepared them for the reception of mass culture.
Gretkowska (My zdies` emigranty [We Are Russian Emigrés], Tarot paryski [The Parisian Tarot], Kabaret Metafizyczny [Metaphysical Cabaret], Podrecznik do ludzi [Textbook on People], and Swiatowidz [World-Watcher]) writes prose steeped in autobiographical elements that play with the mode of the French essay; she is a textbook example of a post-modernist. She gracefully and nimbly navigates a discourse ranging from the esoteric through the erotic (shocking the uninitiated along the way). On the one hand, her attitude would seem to emphasize the exhaustion of a naive faith in words and the impossibility of provocation; on the other, her latest book seems to show the "professional scandalist" of Polish literature in a more soothing mode, in the process of discovering some new form of faith. "Travel, pray. And love," she writes in Swiatowidz. Gretkowska also wrote the screenplay for Andrzej Zulawski's film Szamanka (She-Shaman), which stirred moral outrage even though it was far from the first serious work of eroticism in Polish cinema.
Goerke opens our minds to absurdity and suspense in her literary-religious mini-fable Fraktale (Fractals), imbued with the fascination of the Orient.
Filipiak is one of the few writers for whom feminism remains a vital, creative formula for thinking about the world and herself. Aside from Smierc i spirala (Death and the Spiral) and Niebieska menazeria (The Blue Menagerie), her Absolutna amnezja (Absolute Amnesia) is the anthem of her generation.
Olga Tokarczuk is an unquestionably talented storyteller who is systematically expanding her range as a writer. She has produced novels over a wide fabular and formal spectrum. The France of Louis XIV and the fairy-tale Pyrenees of Podrozy ludzi Ksiegi (Journeys of the People of the Book) are the distillation of a historical period filled with secret knowledge, hermetics and alchemy; the novel is a metaphor of the human pursuit for the Book and the sense of all things. In E.E., the spiritualistically gifted little girl Erna Eltzner and turn-of-the-century Breslau (Wroclaw) serve as reminders to a world obsessed with scientific progress that the True Mystery lies deeply hidden and will always remain a Mystery, even to its bearers. Prawiek (Time Immemorial) is a story of myths and time, with a cosmogonic structure and written in the mode of magical realism, based on twentieth-century Polish events and shibboleths.
Perhaps the most sensual and exotic novels are those of the young writer Zyta Rudzka. Her first novel, Biale klisze (White Negatives) caused much talk and won some serious awards. Her subsequent novels Uczty i glody (Feasts and Famine) and Palac Cezarow (The Palace of the Emperors) lived up to the expectations she had created among critics and readers.
Many more women writers would have to be mentioned here in order to provide a full picture of contemporary Polish literature: Anna Bojarska, Maria Bojarska, Ida Fink, Anna Burzynska, Anna Nasilowska, Hanna Kowalewska, Malgorzata Saramonowicz, Eva Hoffman, Malgorzata Holender and many, many others. The eminent critic Jan Blonski has proclaimed the triumphal return of the novel after years of silence under communism; as we have seen, it also marks the return of women to Polish literature, and these women are determined to shake things up.
Agnieszka Kosinska
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