Acta Baltico-Slavica (Dec 2023)
The Northern Borderland and Eastern Kujawy – Parallels: The Construction of Narrative Identity in the Cycle of Stories “Konopnicka’s Desk” by Maria Danilewicz Zielińska
Abstract
Maria Danilewicz Zielińska was a writer from the region of Kujawy, but she spent her entire adult life in exile. Her autobiographical stories collected in the volume entitled Biurko Konopnickiej [Konopnicka’s Desk] are an example of constructing a narrative identity based on people rooted in their homelands and related events. The first of the local homelands is Kujawy: the author was born in Aleksandrów Pograniczny (today: Aleksandrów Kujawski) and lived there for the first twenty-one years of her life; the second one is the northern Borderland (Kresy) of the former Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Danilewicz had close family ties with the latter, as well as a living memory of its poets and writers. The family, historical and literary parallels connecting but also separating both geographical and cultural areas form pairs. The first one is Kujawy with its towns, nature, inhabitants and their customs, and, on the other hand, the Vilnius and Navahrudak regions, their poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz and Władysław Syrokomla, and ordinary people with their dramatic fate of being displaced. The second pair are rivers and stories related to them: the Vistula and the Nemunas. All these components are places of memory which constitute a hybrid identity of the émigré author from a historical and cultural borderland, an identity constructed by autobiographical memory. Weaving these parallels, she endows them with familiarity, avoiding pathos and mythologisation. Nevertheless, the overwhelming longing for the lost homeland is coupled with its idealisation, especially apparent in the descriptions of nature.
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