Authors

Discussion

The paper presents a comparative analysis of two Polish novels following the fates of rural communities affected by the traumatic aftermath of World War II. While Konwicki’s Dreambook… follows an oneiric, fragmented narrative of an ex-partisan soldier grappling with PTSD, interwoven with the polyphonic voices of ordinary folk, Stasiuk’s Przewóz, written 58 years later, strikes with brutality and realism, bluntly uncovering the hardships of war from the perspective of local peasants, a young Jewish couple and a partisan unit led by violent Plutonowy. Although both novels engage with the same historical period, they produce markedly contrasting representations, largely due to Konwicki’s grounding in the Polish Romantic literary tradition, and Stasiuk’s iconoclastic narrative style.

Both authors explore the role of historical and personal memory which respectively ‘haunt’ their protagonists and prompt them to face the unresolved past. In The Dreambook…, the main character struggles to reconstruct battlefield memories erased by a trauma response, while absorbing vivid accounts of past life in the Eastern Borderlands shared by his hosts. Meanwhile, Przewóz serves as a literary act of remembrance, as Stasiuk purposefully anchors the narrative in his ancestral village and inserts a fictionalised version of himself dealing with intergenerational trauma in the present.

The final section of the paper addresses how the burden of Polish history affects national self-perception among the characters of both novels. Here, I’m using the term provincial anxiety to describe a recurring sense of inferiority linked to Polish identity, discernible in the dialogues of post-war rural communities. The analysis traces how these declarations manifest differently in the characters of The Dreambook… and Przewóz respectively, ranging from despair to hyper-patriotism.