“Your Head Aches from Incessantly Leaning Backward into the Past…”. Time Regained in Marian Pankowskiʼs Prose

The creative output of the “senior” Pankowski offers a revision of the state of widowhood and an attempt to express certain experiences that too often remain unspoken (such as eroticism among elderly people). Whereas in the micro-novel ‘Pismo w stronę miłości’ (‘Writing Towards Love’, 1999) Pankowski brackets off and then deconstructs common ways of speaking and writing about elderly love and the ageing body, the more recent Bal wdów i wdowców (The Widowsʼ and Widowersʼ Ball, 2006) constructs a completely new language (that differs from sentimental speech and refrains from withdrawing into the past tense). By doing so, the author regains speech, time and space for issues that so far have remained on the cultural margins. As such, Pankowski is an exponent of the sensu stricto modernist willingness to widen the borders of reality by means of artistic creation.