Powstanie Styczniowe: Reinterpretacje pamięci. Studia

Abstract

The idea to publish a volume devoted to the January Uprising of 1863-1864 arose in 2014, on the 150th anniversary of this glorious and tragic page in the history of Poland. A group of academics from Białystok and Warsaw decided to collect works – authored mostly by young researchers of the Polish literature – that would show the insurgency and its participants from a new, more contemporary perspective. A perspective encompassing not only the perceptions of those who directly witnessed the Uprising or its aftermath but also the collective memory of the events in twenty-first-century Poland. We put the following research questions to the contributors: What memories of the January Uprising are still kept in family archives today? In what form are they handed down from generation to generation? Our hope was that researchers would discover previously unknown testimonies of how the Uprising was reflected in the deep collective memory of the Polish nation. Indeed, the first chapter contains seven new testimonies of this kind. Whether and how the January Uprising was reflected in the post-1864 Polish literature, subjected to stifling censorship, and in other arts, subjected to police supervision. As one could expect, there was a huge response from writers representing different generations. The Uprising became the subject matter of works by Kraszewski, Orzeszkowa, Narzymski, Bałucki, and many others. How did the image of the Uprising, as depicted in written testimonies, change from the time when its participants and direct witnesses were still alive to the post-1945 literature, which by necessity could only reconstruct and reinterpret the events? As follows from the studies included in the present collection, the two views, although totally different in many respects, converge at the axiological level. Some of the studies were previously published in Warsaw, under the edi torship of Iwona E. Rusek, in a monographic issue (1/2013) of the LiteRacje journal of literary studies. The volume includes twenty-eight articles about the Uprising, its heroes, and literary repercussions. They have been authored by writers of fiction (e.g. Jacek Dehnel), university teachers (Anna Czabanowska-Wróbel, Zbigniew Mikołejko), historians (Wojciech Płoński, Aleksandra Kijak-Sawska, Adam Wójcik-Łużycki) and, last but not least, by literary scholars specialising in the study of Polish literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. The articles are grouped into four sections: I. Family stories; II. In the melting pot of the nineteenth century; III. At the crossroads of history; IV. Between history and myth. Section V includes references and bibliography. The book was prepared for publication at the East-West Chair of Language and Literary Studies of the Faculty of Language and Literature of the University of Białystok. It was edited by Prof. Jarosław Ławski (Białystok), Dr Iwona E. Rusek (Warsaw), and Dr Paweł Wojciechowski (Białystok) and reviewed by Prof. Wojciech Piotrowski (Kielce) and Prof. Marian Śliwiński (Gdańsk). Its publication coincides with the 155th anniversary of the January Uprising (1864–2019).