The Short Story in a Polish Context: Classic Short Fiction from the Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries

Unlike earlier collections of Polish short stories in English translation, which focused primarily on contemporary writing or a specific historical period,1 Oscar E. Swan's The Short in a Polish Context endeavors to present an overview of Polish short fiction from its prehistory in the seventeenth-century Sarmatian “noble tales,” through its Positivist heyday in the late nineteenth century, through interwar modernist and psychological transformations and chilling wartime realism, to postwar literature, including the 2018 Nobel Prize recipient, Olga Tokarczuk.This collection of thirty-two stories by twenty-three authors includes many previously published works, including in earlier anthologies, but several have been retranslated, or translated for the first time, by Swan. Each author is introduced by a brief biographical sketch. Individual stories or groups of stories are followed by Swan's comments, which aim to provide the reader with cultural and historical context, as well as to highlight certain formal aspects of the short-story genre.Two writers included in the book—Jan Potocki and Joseph Conrad—did not write in Polish, and their work is usually considered part of French and English literature respectively, although they were both born in Poland, and in Conrad's case, at least, one can definitely find a number of Polish motifs. Potocki, a scholar and author of the French-language episodic frame-novel, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse [The manuscript found in Saragossa], is placed by Swan among the “precursors” of the Polish short story, along with the late seventeenth-century Sarmatian memoirist Jan Chryzostom Pasek, and the nineteenth-century continuator of the Sarmatian tale, the author of Memoirs of Soplica, Henryk Rzewuski. The juxtaposition may appear odd. The Pasek and Rzewuski stories exemplify the Baroque Sarmatian ethos, a uniquely Polish cultural phenomenon with an important impact on later Polish writing—from Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz, through Henryk Sienkiewicz's epic Trilogy, to Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantic. Potocki, however, was a cosmopolitan aristocrat closer to the ideas of the European Enlightenment, including its rationalist approach to religion, and to libertine picaresque tales than to the God-fearing, if boisterous, narratives of Polish country squires. His real impact on Polish literature had to wait until modern times, when they inspired the works of Michał Choromański, Manuela Gretkowska, Tomasz Jurasz, and others.“Precursors” are followed by the section “The Late Nineteenth Century,” which includes the short story “Ad leones” by late Romantic poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid, as well as several Positivist short stories by Bolesław Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz, and Eliza Orzeszkowa. Joseph Conrad, with his dark short story “The Tale,” a confession of an outwardly decent sea captain who might have committed a horrible act, stands alone in “The Twentieth Century” section as an example of the emergence of the modernist sensitivity. “Poland between the Two World Wars” features two modernists, Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, and two psychological realists, Maria Dąbrowska and Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. The harrowing Polish war experience is represented by two stories from Zofia Nałkowska'sMedallions and Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz story, “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen.” The last section, “The Postwar Polish Short Story,” includes at least three generations of writers representing a wide range of literary styles: Jerzy Andrzejewski, Stanisław Lem, Kazimierz Brandys, Sławomir Mrożek, Hanna Krall, Janusz Głowacki, and Olga Tokarczuk.2The division into sections follows historical, rather than literary, periods. It may also strike the reader as arbitrary because the careers of many authors represented here spanned more than one sociopolitical era in Polish history. Dąbrowska and Iwaszkiewicz were important voices in postwar Polish literature. Andrzejewski started his career in the interwar years, wrote several powerful war stories, and followed a not atypical postwar trajectory from communist enthusiast to dissident writer closely associated with the clandestine Polish opposition of the 1970s.The editor of the anthology says in the preface that the stories in The Short Story in a Polish Context “are well worth reading on their own,” but they were also chosen because they were “rich in analytical possibility” (p. ix). The nature of the commentaries included in the book points to the didactic purpose of the collection. Although those commentaries do not follow a uniform format or length (those about Schulz and Gombrowicz amount to short but comprehensive critical essays while Marek Hłasko gets only two brief paragraphs), they underscore the stories’ messages against the ideological and philosophical debates of the time and explain relevant political circumstances and social conditions (including the standard layout of a nineteenth-century Polish tenement building!). Some authors occasion brief glosses on general literary concepts such as modernism, absurdism, or social criticism, and remarks on historical topics, including Polish life under communism or Polish-Jewish relations during World War II.Formal analysis is mostly limited to plot structure and occasionally to narrative techniques. These are considered parts of the “deep structure” of a literary work—the elements that are most easily paraphrased and translated. Surface elements, such as style, diction, and other linguistic elements, quite important in the case of some of the included authors, are largely left out, probably because they would be hard to explain without recourse to the Polish originals. The collection's subtitle “classic short fiction” suggests the editor's preference for “plot-driven” works following the “classical,” that is, Aristotelian, model of completeness (beginning, middle, and end), and plots structured according to the “dramatic pyramid” (also hearkening back to Aristotle's Poetics), with exposition, the turning point, rising action with complications and crises, the climax, and falling action leading to the resolution. Swan provides a comprehensive discussion of this model in his introduction, and he focuses his structural analyses on identifying and explaining the pyramid's chief elements (or their echoes in stories that deliberately obscure, hide, or rearrange the classical dramatic points). Modern critical theory has shifted away from plot analysis as a practical tool in academic literary criticism, but it is continued by some schools of criticism, including Northrop Frye's criticism. Plot analysis also possesses a definite didactic value evidenced by the fact that the “dramatic pyramid” (in several variations) is still taught in many creative writing courses.As a teaching resource, the present anthology is meant for students with no, or limited, knowledge of Polish, and equally limited knowledge of Polish history and culture. The comments, with some exceptions, are rather fundamental, but they can serve as a framework to be developed during in-class discussions. The book can be used in introductory courses of Polish Literature, courses of Polish and East-European cultural studies, and courses in comparative literature. Stories from this collection, together with the editor's comments, could be recommended for high school reading lists in world literature. The Short Story in a Polish Context is a valuable and useful addition to the still limited body (especially concerning earlier historical periods) of Polish literary resources available in English.