The Autobiographical Triangle Cross-Roads. Studies in Culture, Literary Theory, and History Edited by Ryszard Nycz Volume 14 Małgorzata Czermińska Critical revised edition and translation by Jean Ward The Autobiographical Triangle Witness, Confession, Challenge Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. The Publication is funded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland as a part of the National Programme for the Development of the Humanities. This publication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. Critical revised edition and translation by Jean Ward Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck Cover Design: © Olaf Gloeckler, Atelier Platen, Friedberg Cover photograph: © Izabela Szymańska ISSN 2191-6179 ISBN 978-3-631-67427-7 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-653-06835-1 (E-PDF) E-ISBN 978-3-653-70860-6 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-653-70861-3 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b15550 Open Access: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 unported license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ © Małgorzata Czermińska, 2019 Peter Lang – Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien This publication has been peer reviewed. Reviewer: Adam Dziadek www.peterlang.com For my husband Jurand and our sons: Michał, Adam and Jan Translator’s Foreword Many of the literary works discussed in this book have not been translated into English. In order not to give the impression that a published translation exists when it does not, I have adopted a slightly unusual policy. In the first instance, the Polish title of the work is given, followed by a translation in square brackets. If this is not simply an explanation of what the original title means but refers to a work which really exists in English, italics (for books) or inverted commas (for poems, short stories etc.) are used, and from then on I use the English title. If no published translation exists, in most cases I continue to use the Polish title. In the case of works entitled Pamiętnik [Memoir], as for example those by Stanisław Brzozowski or Janusz Korczak, I have used the word Memoir with a capital letter but without italics, to indicate that I am referring to a specific work published in Polish but not translated into English. I have not translated the titles of critical works documented in the footnotes, unless it seems important to the argument to do so. Unless otherwise indicated, passages from the literary and critical texts referred to in the book are quoted in my translation. However, when an appro- priate published translation is available, I have generally used it. I have tried as far as possible to supply place names, names of publishers and dates of publication for the literary works and studies referred to in the book, but in some cases this information is not obtainable – for example, texts produced by the underground “second circulation” during the communist period were often not furnished with a place of publication, for obvious reasons. Place names involve some difficulty because of the way that Poland “moved” on the map after World War II, so that many places which had been in pre- war Poland and had Polish names are now in other countries and are known by other names. This consideration applies particularly to places which today are in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine but which before World War II belonged to Poland’s Eastern Borderlands. To refer to present-day Lviv, for example, as “Lwów”, or present-day Vilnius as “Wilno”, as I frequently do in this book, is not, of course, to suggest that Ukraine or Lithuania have no claim to these cities. It is simply to give the place name with which the memory and imagination of the writers discussed here is associated. Where present-day names are different, I indicate this in the text. Except in the case of Warsaw, I do not anglicise the spelling of any Polish cities. Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................ 13 The Theory of the Autobiographical Triangle as Work in Progress ............. 13 Part One Three Autobiographical Stances .............................................................. 21 1. The Field of Non-Fiction Prose Literature of Fact ................................................................................................ 22 Literature of Personal Document ..................................................................... 24 The Essay ............................................................................................................. 26 2. The Autobiographical Triangle: Witness, Confession, Challenge ......................................................................................................... 29 The Rhetorical Sources of the Three Stances .................................................. 34 Interchangeability of Autobiographical Stances ............................................. 38 Gombrowicz Throws Down the Gauntlet ....................................................... 42 Then Who Is the Addressee of the Diary’s Challenge? .................................. 49 Diaries after Gombrowicz ................................................................................. 51 Part Two Confessions, Confidences, Dreams 1. The Spiritual Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Polish Literature ......................................................................................................... 61 The Mystical Autobiography ............................................................................. 64 The Spiritual Autobiography ............................................................................. 67 Protestant and Catholic Traditions Meet: John Henry Newman ................. 68 The Memoir ......................................................................................................... 72 10 Contents The Library ......................................................................................................... 73 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 97 ...... 101 2. Intertextual Connections in the Spiritual Autobiography Four Types of Intertextual Allusion ............................................................... 101 A Case of a Dense Network of Allusions ...................................................... 104 Part Three Witness Inscribed in Place 1. Autobiographical Places and the Topographic Imagination: On the Relations between Place and Identity ...... 117 Individual Places of Memory .......................................................................... 121 The Topographic Imagination ........................................................................ 125 Types of Autobiographical Place .................................................................... 127 2. Home in the Autobiography and the Novel about Childhood ...................................................................................................... 139 Inside the House ............................................................................................... 143 The Garden of Childhood ............................................................................... 147 The Land of Childhood .................................................................................... 151 Arriving – Homecoming ................................................................................. 162 The Death Knell for the Home of Childhood ............................................... 165 3. Larders of Memory: Transformations of the Borderland Theme in the Autobiographical Novel .............................................. 173 Idyll and Tragedy: the Memory of the Borderlands .................................... 176 A Hint of the Grotesque and the Invasion of History ................................. 184 An Attempt At Epic Distance: Towards a Deconstruction of the Myth .... 193 Contents 11 4. The Centre and the Borderland Periphery in the Prose of Writers Born after World War II ......................................................... 197 Polish Writers Whose Home Is the City of Günter Grass ........................... 198 Describing Childhood after Yalta ................................................................... 202 The Disturbance of the Borderlands Reaches the Centre ........................... 212 5. Space Disturbed: Testimonies to the Post-Yalta “Migration of Peoples” ............................................................................ 215 The End and the Beginning ............................................................................ 215 Written Now, Written Then ............................................................................ 217 Time and Space after Yalta .............................................................................. 220 From East to West and to Other Corners of the Earth ................................ 222 Encounters with Foreignness .......................................................................... 225 Jews Who Survived .......................................................................................... 228 Disturbances in the Centre