Authors

Discussion

The paper argues that the events of 1968 (specifically the events known as March’68) resulted in a major cultural, literary, and ethical disruption and diversion in Polish culture that lasted twenty years until the collapse of communism in 1989. It was only after communism collapsed that open discussions about the events of 1968 and its long-term political, social, and cultural consequences could take place, although some discussions had begun slightly earlier, around 1976, in underground publications in communist Poland and in émigré press. 

The paper systematises the two major paths taken by Polish literature that is literature written mostly in Polish: the autobiographical writing of the post memory generation ("second-generation survivors"), written and published in forced exile (but also in Swedish or Italian); and literature written in communist Poland which often relied on various literary means to avoid censorship and literary suppression by the state. I argue that those autobiographical texts (such as those of Goldkorn, Zaremba-Bielawski, Tuszynska, Kuryluk, Gren, Keff-Uminska, among others) are characterised by a special positioning of the narrator which I call traumatic entanglement with three major characteristics: in-choosing, in-positioning and in-suffering. 

As regards literature written in communist Poland and published within state censorship (e.g., the works of Osiecka, Szpotanski, Młynarski, Miedzyrzecki, Ficowski, Rymkiewicz, Tenenbaum), I argue that such texts often use remorsefulness and shame as a metaphor for the events of March’68, especially the anti-Semitic campaign of Gomulka’s government. The language of synecdoche, or the Aesopian language, with its clear referencing to Orwellian Newspeak or Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich represents the distinctive characteristic of these texts clarifying the ethical and political position of the authors. It was also dominant in works of the older generation of émigré poets, especially Wierzynski’s volume Black Polonise where he presented himself as “a Pole who is ashamed”.