Od karnawału do traumy. Przemiany obrazu polskiej granicy wschodniej

The article presents a synthetic overview of the image of the eastern border in non-fiction and fiction literature written after 2010, which reflects the dynamic historical and geopolitical processes that have taken place in these areas (Michał Androsiuk’s Biały koń [The white horse] was published in Belarusian in 2006, with a Polish translation from 2011). Chronologically the topics addressed in the texts discussed cover the period from the establishing of the border in 1944–1945 to the year 2024 and the humanitarian crisis. The author reflects on the consequences of the arbitrary, ‘cabinet’ border demarcation and the “flipped world” the term she uses in reference to the period of intense trafficking activity. The last part of the article concerns texts that depict Polish eastern borderlands as a “death zone”. The interpretations include works by Dana Łukasińska, Ewa Pluta, Mikołaj Grynberg, Dorota Borodaj, Urszula Glensk, Andrzej Stasiuk and Hanna Krall.