Estetyczne aspekty literatury polskich, białoruskich i litewskich Tatarów (od XVI do XXI w.)

Abstract

The present volume collects the proceedings of the International Conference “Aesthetic Aspects of the Literature of Polish, Belarusian and Lithuanian Tatars (from the 16th to the 21st Century)”, which took place in Białystok and Sokółka from 14 to 15 November 2014, under the aus-pices of the Polish Society of Comparative Studies of Literature. The con-ference was organized by the Chair in Philological Studies “East – West”, the Faculty of Philology at the University of Białystok, the Podlasian Sec-tion of the Union of Polish Tatars, and the Łukasz Górnicki Library of Podlasie in Białystok. Among the attendants of the first day’s session at the Łukasz Górnicki Library and the second day’s meeting at the Cultural Center of Sokółka, there were researchers from academic centres in Bel-arus, Lithuania, Poland, Tatarstan, Ukraine and the United Kingdom, as well as representatives of the Tatar minority from the Podlaskie Voivode-ship in Poland. The researchers discussed Tatar literature that originated in the 16th century in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was later devel-oped in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. This book consists of an introduction and three chapters. Chapter One, “Manuscripts of the Tatars of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania”, examines issues related to old writings of Polish-Lithuanian Tatars. Chapter Two, “Contemporary Literature of Polish Tatars”, focuses on the newest Polish-Tatar literature. The last chapter gathers articles dedicated to liter-ary and cultural analyses, which are significant in the studies of Tatar lit-erature in Central and Eastern Europe. These include issues related to lit-erature, fashion and the Turkish-Tatar folklore, as well as questions re-garding literature created in other areas of the Muslim culture – in Bosnia and Morocco. The chapter features also an article exploring Tatar motifs in the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz. The publication gathers texts written in Polish, English and Russian, therefore the introduction has three language versions. Apart from the scholarly papers per se, each article is accompanied by summaries in two languages, other than the language of the main text. The book has been edited by Grzegorz Czerwiński, PhD, a literary scholar, specialist in the theory of literature and comparative literature, and Artur Konopacki, PhD, a historian and educator, whose research focuses on Tatar history in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It has been reviewed by Włodzimerz Szturc (Professor of Polish philology) and Henryk Jankowski (Professor of Turkology), and published in the scholarly literary series “Colloquia Orientalia Bialostocensia”.