Polish Literature as World Literature

This coedited volume joins recent scholarly efforts to situate Polish literary tradition in the context of world literature, following such projects as Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918 (2018), Another Canon: The Polish Nineteenth-Century Novel in World Context (2020), Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (2021), and the most recent, The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature (2022), to name only a few major forays into this new critical territory. Piotr Florczyk and K. A. Wiśniewski readily acknowledge their predecessors while also making a case for their volume's distinctness in dealing with the subject matter. What sets this compact publication apart is the diversity of approaches presented by the contributors and its attunement to tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes that shape the status of the Polish cultural idiom in the global literary marketplace.Polish Literature as World Literature consists of thirteen chapters, preceded by the editors’ introduction that outlines their project's broader cultural and critical context. Florczyk and Wiśniewski highlight the challenges of viewing Polish literature as world literature by invoking the polemic between Czesław Miłosz and his Western reviewer, Al Alvarez, in which the Polish Nobel laureate vehemently rejects reading his work as a record of East-Central European/Polish historical experience. Commenting on this exchange as emblematic of the issues of Polish literature's reception in the English-speaking world, the editors posit their volume's central problem: “Polish literature, just like the country and its people, wants to be seen as firmly European, perhaps even worldly, yet to fully appreciate it, we must read it as belonging to the periphery. Would doing so bring it into the center and thus strip it off the qualities that make it most interesting to foreign readers?” (p. 8). The articles collected in the volume examine various engagements with and uses of this fundamental tension between the universal (“worldly”) and the particular (“Polish,” “East-Central European,” and so forth).Michał Paweł Markowski's psychoanalytically inspired essay on “Polish cultural neurosis,” which the scholar defines as wrestling with seemingly incompatible desires for universality and (culturally specific) authenticity, problematizes the idea of Polishness as a marker of identity and artistic idiom. Not surprisingly, in seeking the cure for the neurotic condition afflicting modern Polish literature, Markowski turns to Witold Gombrowicz, whose entire literary career can be viewed as a continuous struggle with the “Polish form.” Markowski juxtaposes Gombrowicz's radical rejection of the above dichotomy and his plunge into “the chaos boiling under the steps of any human being” (p. 29) with that of his compatriots, like Miłosz and the literary critic Andrzej Kijowski, both of whom seek remedies for “a formless, chaotic force closing up the channels leading to the world” (p. 22) (i.e., Polishness) in subjecting oneself to universal, transnational forms (classicism and Catholicism, respectively). Markowski's study finds a polemical counterpoint in Jacek Gutorow's chapter, also centered on Gombrowicz, which argues that the writer's attitude towards his Polish identity is much more ambivalent: the idea of Polishness is for the author of Ferdydurke a form one needs to overcome, but at the same time a life-long, self-defining obsession. Marta Koronkiewicz and Paweł Kaczmarski examine the legacy and continuation of this struggle in their comparative reading of the most recent Polish Nobel Prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk, and the enfant terrible of Polish fiction, Dorota Masłowska, both of whom present radically distinct attitudes toward Polishness (mystifying and demystifying, respectively).Predictably, émigré and “dual-citizenship” writers like Jan Potocki, Adam Mickiewicz, Bruno Schulz, and the already mentioned Gombrowicz feature prominently in the book. Each chapter dedicated to these figures gives a fresh perspective on their oeuvres. However, for readers familiar with these names and their international reception, the more exciting aspect of the volume will no doubt be its inclusion of less cosmopolitan authors, like the Positivist classic Eliza Orzeszkowa (examined alongside Edith Wharton in Lena Magnone's essay) and writers on the peripheries of the Polish canon, like Leo Lipsky (the protagonist of Andrzej Brylak's venture into Polish-Israeli literature), Piotr Sommer, Andrzej Sosnowski, and other poets of the 1990s generation (covered by Kacper Bartczak's essay on the Polish reception of the New York School), and the newcomer Tomasz Jedrowski (whose 2020 novel Swimming in the Dark serves Ela Przybyło as an example of “Polish queer world literature”). Likewise interested in expanding and subverting existing canons is Katarzyna Bartoszyńska, whose essay seeks to recuperate the early nineteenth-century Polish novel both for domestic and world literature. Agnieszka Jeżyk's exploration of the cannibalistic tropes in the works of Polish futurists and Katarzyna Bazarnik's essay on Zenon Fajfer's concept of “liberature”—“a literary genre in which the text and the material body of the book are fused into a meaningful whole” (p. 193)—complement this eclectic collection.Methodological and generic heterogeneity is no doubt the book's most significant asset, but also its shortcoming. The essays collected here differ in scope, approach, and even genre: readers will find here biographical sketches, polemics, manifestos, comparative studies, surveys, and publication histories, among others. Some of the essays bridge the gap between academic and non-academic audiences, while others address a reader well-oriented in the current state of the field. Trekking through such varied terrain offers rewards and excitement. Still, it can also be somewhat disorienting: a feeling aggravated by the roominess of the central conceptual framework that covers the emergent discourses about the idea of “world literature,” as well as the more traditional approaches to literary history and intertextuality. Although the editors do a splendid job outlining the stakes and contexts of their project, the thematic and methodological breadth of the volume, coupled with its compact size, means that not all the essays “talk to” one another as one might wish they did.However, the above issues should not overshadow the fact that the volume's diversity—reflected both in content and the roster of contributors—successfully highlights exciting new avenues for Polish literary studies. The strong representation of women and LGBTQ+ authors deserves particular praise, given the collection's necessarily selective approach to Polish literary history. Essays dedicated to them are also among those most effectively showcasing the new potentialities residing in the “global” mode of reading proposed by the book. All in all, despite its modest size, Polish Literature as World Literature dazzles the reader with a myriad of approaches that render the seemingly familiar territories of Polish national identity and literary canon ripe with new interpretive possibilities. As such, it is a welcome contribution to our field and a worthy addition to the growing body of scholarship exploring the global dimensions of national literatures.