Local Patriotism
Tadeusz Komendant
At the origin of the literature of local patriotism (sometimes snidely referred to as the literature of going back to one's roots) lies the myth of the Kresy, the now-lost Polish East. Postwar migrations of peoples and borders have left that region outside Poland, but it still occupies a place of honor in the national imagination.
The biographical uprooting of some writers and the fact that they were unable to discuss this situation openly contributed to the birth of the mythological literature of the lost East. This literature delat with the phantom pains located in an amputated hand, and it did so in highly sophisticated works that entered into refined literary games. Tadeusz Konwicki mythologized his Vilnius childhood; Andrzej Kusniewicz melded a multinational Galicia into literary ecumenism; Julian Stryjkowski evoked out of nothingness the murdered world of the Galician Jews, and Leopold Buczkowski, the most radical of them all, moved from a record of the fratricidal bloodbaths of Volhynia to the destruction of literary plot. In my opinion, these are the four most important exponents of the Kresy school, although many other works, including Czeslaw Milosz's Dolina Issy, fit into the same category.
These novels were, in the most literal sense, a search for times past and an expedition into the depths of the writers' own memory. They were, first and foremost, acts of writing. They had little in common with the wave of nostalgic, and at times even revanchist memoirs that were published, for the most part, by Poles living abroad. Nevertheless, the Kresy classics underwent a particular kind of reassessment in the late Seventies. Their literary qualities became less important, while their topography counted for more. People began to read them as authentic documents, and looked to them for local truths and the truths of a different sense of time. The mythography of Kresy literature was transformed into the literature of local patriotism.
The new generation of writers who had grown up in communist Poland could not call upon personal recollections that had been ravaged by Marxist ideology. They were deprived of the right of appeal to their own memories. Other experiences were more significant for them: the reading of cemeteries, and the 'dead time' of the Martial Law period.
The cemetery is a place where time stops and memory returns. That generation spent its childhood among orphaned cemeteries-post-German, post-Jewish, and post-Ukrainian. Those cemeteries were like the ruins of a civilization that had long sice ceased to exist. Those cemeteries were the setting for the first erotic gropings, the first drinking parties, and for games of soccer with skulls dug out of the graves. Such experiences return, like a refrain and a pang of conscience, in many memoirs. Stefan Chwin, for instance, told an interviewer that he 'often thought of the fate of the Protestant cemetery in Gdansk. It was a veritable city of graves that stretched for whole kilometers on both sides of Victory Boulevard, from the Oliva Gate all the way to the Polytechnic. And it was a very beautiful city. There were thousands of crosses, stone markers, and statues. The inscriptions were carved in beautiful Gothic letters in the black marble. Ivy. Hornbeams. Yews. Long alleys under the chestnut trees. Thick chains. Cast-iron memorial tablets. Granite spheres. Obelisks. All destroyed. Today, there are mowed lawns and park trails where boys in T-shirts race on skateboards in good weather. Not a single grave has been left in peace.' The reading of cemeteries is a lesson in sensitivity to the language of place. The martial law period added another experience of time: empty time, arrested time. It seemed that time had simply stoped passing...
The literature of local patriotism rose to meet both these challenges. It sprang from the experience of empty time, endeavoring to restore the fullness of time by constructing a private myth. The phenomenon was not purely literary. The development of a new awareness accompanied these books, which often occupied a place on the edges of pure literature because they had a different functionto perform: they were a witness of the return to the realm of experience connected with the hometown or the region that was the object of local patriotism. To a world that is not given a priori to perception, but that must be laboriously reconstructed. This world often fit within the boundaries of a 'township,' and was associated with the writer's birthplace. In other words, it was associated with a metaphorical cemetery, and the writer had to flesh out the message of this cemetery, like an archaeologist. In this sense, the literature of local patriotism was the complete opposite of Kresy literature, which was a reading not of places, but of memories-and in the past perfect tense.
It is no accident that Gdansk is regarded as the place where the literature of local patriotism was born. The example of Grass is undoubtedly important, but even more important was that extraordinary palimpsest that ids the city of Gdansk itself. The reading of that palimpsest is what made Stefan Chwin-and us, his readers-sensitive to details. We did not read Weiser Dawidek because of the skill with which its author, Pawel Huelle, manipulates literary daguerrotypes; what caught our attention was the way that he tried to capture experiences that were crucial to the postwar generation of Gdansk residents. Huelle dug through the wall of the literary and came out on the other side, where there is life itself.
If we wanted to play with words, we could refer to this literature as ecological and egological, as an effort to integrate us with the world. This literature extends to natural connections. It reconstructs the imagination and seeks a language of its own. This is why the phenomenon cannot be limited to Gdansk. In Sny i kamienie, Magdalena Tulli undertakes the reading of another urban palimsest: Warsaw. Kazimierz Brakoniecki and the Borussia magazine group have uncovered the Atlantis of northern Poland. Books have appeared on Wroclaw (by Andrzej Zawada), Bydgoszcz (Grzegorz Musial), Lower Silesia (Olga Tokarczuk's Dom dzienny, dom nocny), the Lower Beskid mountain region (Andrzej Stasiuk's Opowiesci galicyjskie, and Zamosc (Piotr Szewc). Since the trauma came before everything else-the experience of empty time and the drama of being uprooted-then this literary trend can also be extended to include the books written by Polish Jews who were forced to emigrate in 1968. Wilhelm Dichter's Kon Pana Boga and Roman Gren's Krajobraz z dzieckiem are the best examples: these books, too, seek their roots in cinammon shops and old trunks seeped in the smell of mothballs. This is the natural scent of recovered memory.
The literary formula of local patriotism, which was associated with the archaeology of biographically significant places and the reconstruction of time, seems to have reached the point of exhaustion. In my private history of literature, it began in 1983 with Wlodzimierz Pazniewski's Krotkie dni. 'I was never in that house, and yet I recall everything perfectly,' is the opening line of that novel about an imaginary childhood spent in Krzemieniec (now in Ukraine), a tender pastiche of Galician literature. Two books mark the close of this period for me. Olga Tokarczuk's 1996 novel Prawiek i inne czasy is the writing ex nihilo, in the conventions of popular literature, of primordial worlds condemned to destruction. Jerzy Limon's Wieloryb. Wypisy zrodlowe is a postmodernist game based on a non-existant history of Western Pomerania; it provokes ruminations upon the nature of history.
Topography is overgrown with topoi. The reconstruction of time compels us to ask how to write the history of those who have been deprived of history.
Tadeusz Komendant
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