Известия Уральского федерального университета. Серия 2: Гуманитарные науки (Jan 2024)
P. Czerwiński’s Dystopia International in the Context of the Young Polish Prose of the Early 21st Century
Abstract
This article analyses the novel International (2011) by Piotr Czerwiński, a representative of the so-called “post-PRL” generation and describes the worldview of this generation as a whole and its reasons. The change of the system rendered the romanticism of social resistance, which had been one of the most important pillars of Polish mentality and culture, pragmatically unclaimed. This tool of national consolidation, which had repeatedly proved its real effectiveness, lost its obvious field of application, and turned into an instrument of violence, because romantic myths continue to be present in Polish public consciousness and the subconscious, and are actively used by the authorities. The deadlock between the two discourses — the new and the old, global consumerism and heroic martyrology — has led to a massively expressed sense of hopelessness, fear, and their own inferiority by young writers. Czerwiński’s text is considered from the perspective of the genres of utopia, dystopia, and post-dystopia. The aim of the study is to analyse and identify the supertask of Czerwiński’s ironic reinterpretation of the extra-literary context, to bring to absurdity the merged ideas of (super)Polishness and (super)consumerism. First of all, the novel refers to the specificity of the Polish mentality and only secondly is a warning for any nationalist “accentuation” of society. Attention is also paid to the linguistic aspect of the alarmism of the novel: the prose of the “post-PRL” generation, of which the analysed novel is a vivid example, is a reaction both to the dissatisfaction with Polish reality and to the inadequacy of the language functioning in society to this experience. As a result, the author concludes that for Czerwiński, as for other young prose writers of this time, the generation and experience of comic consciousness becomes only partially a liberating experience.
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