Authors

Discussion

Ever since it was promoted by Milan Kundera in his celebrated essay The Kidnapped West, or the Tragedy of Central Europe (1984), the concept of Central Europe has been disputed among scholars due to its vagueness. Whichever way construed, the idea of Central Europe has reverberated in contemporary Polish fiction, producing a distinct body of literature that expresses both cultural specificity and a more unanimous tension in relation to history in the region located between the East and the West. In 2000 Ukrainian writer Yurii Andrukhovych and Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk published My Europe: Two Essays on So-called Central Europe in which they set out on personal journeys through the part of Europe which they consider "theirs" and "central" to them, namely Galicia – a province situated in the borderlands between Poland and Ukraine. On the other hand, the works of Olga Tokarczuk (an author who often presents herself as Central European) are deeply rooted in the history of Lower Silesia – a region existing between Czech, German and Polish spheres of influence. In the works of these authors, history is constantly reminiscent, intricately interwoven in stories that are linked to places marked by the past. Drawing on Stasiuk's and Andrukhovych's My Europe as well as Tokarczuk's novel House of day, House of Night, my paper revolves around "home" as trope in the postcolonial context of postmemory and displacement.