Marian Pankowski and Polishness. The Literary Provocations of an Émigré

Marian Pankowskiʼs concept of writing stems from the position of a rebellious artist profoundly convinced of his talent searching for the most fitting literary formula for himself. His literary provocations are a sign of his disapproval of the stereotypical representations of both his motherland and the West, religion and Western civilisation. Reckonings with history, the romantic approach, religion and unfettered eroticism are attempts to break free from the ossified forms and masques that constrain the individual. The debunking of the myth of Polish emigration – Pankowskiʼs fellow-countrymen imitating the romantic tradition in the aftermath of national uprisings – serves the same purpose. The Polishness remembered from childhood was simplicity untainted by politics and ideology, artificial pathos and hypocrisy. This is contrasted with the picture of émigré Polishness: carnivalesque religious-patriotic get-togethers under the aegis of Our Lady of Częstochowa and the Great Emigration. Assuming the position of an outsider deliberately alienated from the circles of writers in Poland and Polish émigrés, he provokes Poles to debate about Polishness.