W poszukiwaniu utraconego imperium. Polska imperialna jako świat i jako wyobrażenie

The heritage of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth is one of the most problematic residues of the Polish past. After World War II, Poland lost its so-called Eastern Borderlands, which meant a break with a specific state tradition, the most important link of which was the powerful Polish-Lithuanian state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The potential and significance of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth remains an important topic of Polish identity discourse. One of the issues addressed in that context is the imperial character of that state. The importance of this issue goes beyond the space of historiographic debates. It also concerns the place and role of Poland in the world from both historical and contemporary perspective. A common element of various narratives around the national-state status is myth. Myth is a story told for the needs of a specific social group, but it also refers to some of the supra-class conditions that could be described as the ontology of national being. Thanks to this, it can be treated as one of the tools used to study not only self-perceptions of the community, but also the interactions that occur between these self-images and real determinants of the community’s status. According to the author of the article, postcolonial studies create a possibility of integrated research on Polish imperiality, since they combine a number of different competencies necessary to comprehensively cover this broad topic. The sphere of national mythology is combined from a postcolonial perspective with a vast sphere of social facts and real-life conditions.

Totalitaryzm i wolność w świetle paradygmatów kultury. Współczesna Rosja

The presented paper is of a theoretical character. It includes a reflection on the mechanisms behind the rebirth of totalitarianism, using contemporary Russia as a case study. The research period taken as exemplification for the theoretical part comprises years 2000–2020 and was chosen for three reasons, mutually interconnected. The first among them is the election of Vladimir Putin, regarded as a strong symbolical representation of centralized state power, as the president of Russian Federation. Secondly, the consolidation of power in the hands of one man who had the tools to control and affect the political system. Thirdly, the modification of the Russian Federation Constitution to favor the durability of Putin’s government. The presented results point to the mechanisms behind the activation of totalitarian tendencies in Russian culture in the light of long-lasting cultural paradigms: collectivism and con-centrism.

Ile to już utopii przeżyliśmy przez 75 lat, a myślenie utopijne wciąż ma się nieźle!

The author tries to figure out how many utopian visions he has witnessed in the last 75 years.

Freedom on the post-totalitarian horizon

The authors of this sketch are drawing a panorama of the potential interpretational aspects of understanding the category of freedom in the societies of the post-communist part of Europe. At the same time, they attempt to define the horizon for finding the answer to the identity-forming question that is key for this georegion, i.e. about the essence and the specificity of processes, phenomena and mechanisms of emancipation of culture and societies of post-totalitarian European countries from the legacy of World War II, and particularly its post-Yalta consequences which embedded the countries and nations of Central, East and South-East Europe in the sphere of imperial subordination of Soviet dominance for nearly another half a century.

Narracje wolnościowe w niemieckiej literaturze po 1945 roku

The article aims to indicate what freedom models have been created in post-1945 German literature. What seems particularly interesting is looking into the development of literary motifs in correlation with political events and social movements. The articles refer to such significant milestones as 1945, 1968, 1989, 2011, and finally, 2015. Theses surrounding the theories of contemporariness and modernization are key to those thoughtful considerations. The processes of individualization and hybridization occurring within one world experiencing globalization are also important.

Władza — etyka — egzystencja (uwagi o powieści Piotra Aleszkowskiego Twierdza)

Using metaphorical connotations terms functioning within postcolonial theory, the author analyzes mechanisms ruling the world of the novel Fortress (Крепость) by Piotr Aleshkovsky.

Figuracje kobiecości i strategie wolnościowe. Komparatystyka powieści Bator, Plebanek i Gretkowskiej (w trzech krokach)

Manuela Gretkowska, Joanna Bator and Grażyna Plebanek: three female authors, each of them involved in the ‘pro-woman’ discourse. Are the literary testimonies of this discourse and the figurations of femininity in their prose subject to synthesis in terms of the heroines’ freedom aspirations? What is the freedom of women in the light of these texts? The comparative procedure consists of three steps. Firstly, a comparison of the worlds presented in the dimension of the protagonists’ fates and the final storyline solutions. Secondly — of the functionality of the chosen state of aggregation within the plot, i.e. eroticism as a set of specific images (or anti-images) of the protagonists’ experiences. Thirdly — comparing the narrative structures (e.g. the role of metafiction), as well as attempting to determine what the selected modus operandi of each narrative results in.

Rosyjski literaturocentryzm w kontekście postkolonialnym

The development of postcolonial studies as a research discipline to a large extent depends on their representatives’ ability to overcome their own post-colonial conditions. This particularly applies to researchers representing imperial cultures. Russian post-colonial studies develop their own cognitive categories in relation to the issue of Russian and Soviet imperialism, while avoiding many potential inspirations contained in the book by Ewa Thompson “Imperial Knowledge: Russian Literature and Colonialism”, which became an important reference for postcolonial research in Poland and Ukraine. The author of the article outlines the shaping of Russian literaturocentrism, and then, tries to answer the question of whether and to what extent it can be a useful issue for research on the imperial determinants of Russian culture.

Demony przeszłości. Więzy pamięci i tradycje powieści gotyckiej

The ‘uncanny’, according to Freud — the feeling that something familiar turns out as strange and unknown, seems to have become a leading paradigm in the memory discourse in literature. Revenants, among them zombies, golems, dybbuks, ghosts, monsters, and changelings — the whole world of the supernatural and paranormal characters brings to mind what has been forgotten within the collective memory. This paper discusses two recent manifestations of the uncanny: Szczepan Twardoch’s The king of Warsaw (Król) and Jacek Dehnel’s But with our dead ones (Ale z naszymi umarłymi). The main objective is to examine the idea of a shadow-world as a design to analyze the multiple ways in which the past affects our present. From this perspective, the publication’s title — Escape from freedom, can be understood as a poetic strategy to symbolize the determining role of the past as a ‘shadow reign’.