Melancholijne granice Europy w prozie Andrzeja Stasiuka

Abstract

Visions of Central Europe present in Andrzej Stasiuk’s prose are the creations of melancholic imagination. The subject of the article is a social placement of this imagination: how does it relate to Central European memory? What kind of utopia is on the reverse of this melancholy? What wound does it cover? Stasiuk’s melancholy understood as a certain kind of “Slavonic sorrow” is unquestionably the answer to torments of re-sen timent and “minor nation’s” spasms of memory. But what exactly does it mean in the specifi c case of Polish south-eastern Borderland? Hence, I am working on the way Stasiuk’s concept of Central Europe corresponds with romantic and post-romantic imaginations of ghastly Ukrainian Borderland, how it refers to the history, war and trauma “written down” in this land and the possibilities to utter them. Empty space becomes here a mark of Easter European “nowhere” – what are the consequences of such establishment of ontology of this part of the world? Moreover, I am also working on the most astonishing aspects of Stasiuk’s prose, namely the fact that his melancholic imagination creates beauty which seems to be completely unquestioned by the readers: how is it possible? Finally, I am considering Stasiuk’s relation to the created reality – the relation of the man to the empty, passive and female-stigmatized space. What kind of masculinity is established through such metaphors?