Polish Access to Island Studies: A Literary Perspective

Poland never possessed noticeable island territories, leading to the natural conviction that a mainland sensitivity dominated. This was also signaled in the shift from the older name for an island, ostrów, meaning a place surrounded by water, to the modern word wyspa, indicating the accumulation of some material. As contemporary Polish literature reveals, there has been a significant shift in Polish representations of islandic experiences, with imaginative travels to islands gradually being replaced by records of personal encounters. In analyzing this turn through case studies, the paper itself will shift in its approach from constructivist to post-constructivist literary criticism. In her short story Wyspa, Olga Tokarczuk builds a performative intertextual geography to question the masculine myth of Robinsonade texts. In a series of books on Iceland, Hubert Klimko-Dobrzeniecki notes the impact of islandic entrapment and transforms his Polish identity according to an archipelagic pattern. Maciej Wasielewski visits a Pacific island where sexual abuses occurred and creates a phenomenology of the island losing its utopian potential and sliding into dystopia. Lastly, Piotr Oleksy describes the geography and history of 44 islands in the estuary of the Oder River, where he spent his childhood, and challenges Polish mainland identity writing from the marginalized position of a Polish islander. Poland’s case as a European culture without overseas colonies (and being colonized itself during the nineteenth century), studied through the lens of its contemporary literature, demonstrates the growing importance of overlooked islandic testimonies within countries dominated by mainland thinking. One of the reasons for this is today’s environmental sensitivities, since the island story is always to some degree also a parable of the fate of mankind, which seems appealing in light of the global climate crisis.