Gustawa Herlinga-Grudzińskiego pamiętanie Grodna i pamiętanie Elizy Orzeszkowej

Abstract

In Grodno, there is a never-ending battle of memory – the memory about people, events and places. The unceasing movement of historical windmills, or a rotating carousel of ideological and political correctness, result in the situation when what is rooted becomes covered with the new. The real is replaced by the symbolic. However, despite the fact that many buildings were destroyed, many people left, the memory boards still mark the former goods. The monuments are the stone signatures of the absent and the tombstones witness their former existence. The paper entitled “Remembering Grodno by Gustaw Herling-Grudziński and Eliza Orzeszkowa”, which dicusses the problem of memory and remembrance, remembering and forgetting, is not only an attempt to answer the question about the place of Eliza Orzeszkowa in the private galaxy of Herling-Grudziński authors. It is not just an attempt to reconstruct a literary portrait of Grodno in the works of the author of “A World Apart”. It is also an attempt to evoke the image of Grodno from the inter-war period.