Polish Short Fiction

Introduction

The history of short fiction in Poland is, like the story of Poland itself, a gradual evolution toward defining a national identity. Because the Polish nation has been a political entity for scarcely fifty years of the last four centuries, the viability of its national literature has been tied to its political struggles against the pernicious pressures of occupation by surrounding nations. Further complicating the definition of Polish short fiction is the country’s numerous languages and subcultures, notably Yiddish and Ukrainian. Given the country’s history of civil strife, some of Poland’s most gifted short-story writers (such as Joseph Conrad) accepted exile to other countries. That said, Poland’s native short fiction long drew on elements of the dominant literary movements of continental Europe. Only in the last decade of the twentieth century, coincident with the democratic elections that marked the end of Soviet domination, did the short fiction of Poland come into its own as a national expression in the hands of a young generation of university-trained writers, who embraced the challenge of creating national literature in the bracing wake of the triumph of Solidarity.

Early History to the Enlightenment

Although much short fiction was written in Poland in the centuries after being established as a Christian nation in 966, that literature (initially in Latin, but later in Polish) reflected the nation’s embrace of Catholicism, largely in the form of hagiographies and parables. Before 966, however, folktales passed on orally demonstrated Poland’s celebration of heroic individuals against daunting obstacles. In “The Dragon of Kraków,” a resourceful shoemaker dopes his fattest sheep with sulfur and feeds them to a dragon that threatens the village, which causes the dragon to explode. In “The Trumpeter of Kraków,” when invading Tartars threaten a village, an old trumpeter in the watchtower sends a warning song that awakens the villagers and ultimately saves the town. When the townspeople rally to thank the trumpeter, they find him dead from a single Tartar arrow.

The earliest significant expression of Polish short fiction dates to the mid-eighteenth century, when, like most European nations, Polish writers embraced the protocols of neoclassicism, imitating Roman and Greek models that used short narratives as didactic tools to encourage right living. Ignacy Krasicki (1735-1801) was the most prominent among these writers, trained in the priesthood and recognized as a prolific poet. Krasicki is known for two volumes of more than two hundred rhyming animal fables, published originally in Polish, which are generally considered the first examples of Polish short fiction. True to the genre, Krasicki’s fables are stylistically accessible but not intended for children: They are philosophical arguments that assume a benign world where reason ultimately triumphs and good vanquishes vice. Many of Krasicki’s fables were barely veiled commentaries on contemporary politics, specifically the initial partitioning of Poland by its far stronger neighbors (Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary).

Romanticism and Social Positivism

In Poland, Romanticism, which swept Europe in the early nineteenth century, emphasizing emotionalism, individualism, and creativity, was expressed principally in grandiloquent political manifestos and sweeping epic poetry that extolled a free Poland. Such political ferment, expressed in doomed insurrections over twenty years, climaxed with the catastrophic 1863 January Uprising. Afterward, a sociocultural movement emerged, which drew heavily on French and British philosophers, that sought to raise the spirits of the crushed nation by reconceiving occupied Poland as a living, evolving entity. Securing its eventual independence, therefore, would start by addressing its social and economic problems with rational thought and pragmatic cooperation. In short fiction, this Social Positivism created the first internationally recognized Polish short-fiction writers, notably Bołeslaw Prus (1847-1912), Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841-1910), and the country’s first Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916).

A journalist by trade, Prus (born Alexander Glowacki) turned to short fiction to probe the psychological realities of Polish everyday life that fascinated him. Like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain (contemporaries to whom he was regularly compared), Prus fashioned memorable characters and used familiar dilemmas, such as marriage and work, to record the ordeals and joys of Polish life, often with understated humor. He published more than forty stories. “Katarynka” (“The Barrel-Organ”) and “Kamizelka” (“The Waistcoat”) are still regularly anthologized. In “The Waistcoat,” for instance, a poor villager dying of tuberculosis tries to conceal his health problems from his wife by bringing in the cinch of his waistcoat as the disease slowly wastes him, claiming to his wife that he is, in fact, robust, gaining weight. The wife, of course, knows the truth. Amid this poignant deception, the man dies, and the wife must sell everything, including the beloved waistcoat. That Orzeszkowa—as a woman denied access to university education and bonded into a loveless marriage that exiled her to a rural village near the Lithuanian border—would achieve international reputation (she was shortlisted for the Nobel that went to Sienkiewicz) is a heroic story in itself. She published more than a hundred stories of semidocumentary narratives of peasant life that advocated radical ideas, such as public education, women’s rights (including divorce), the assimilation of Poland’s Jewish population, and the necessity of the landed rich to work. By contrast, the short fiction of the highly successful Sienkiewicz broke with the optimism of positivism and explored the continental philosophy of naturalism, in which hapless individuals faced the implications of their often disastrous actions in the face of an indifferent universe. His “Szkice węglem” (1877; “Charcoal Sketches,” 1897) offers an unflattering look at characters in a rural village driven by cowardice, greed, lust, and envy. In one story, for instance, a powerful local politician arranges for a neighbor to be drafted into the army so the politician can seduce the neighbor’s wife. In another story, a gifted boy steals a violin to play, only to be caught and beaten to death.

Early Twentieth Century: Young Poland

Inevitably, as Poland continued to be a partitioned nation, the optimistic assumptions of the social positivists grew stale, and the faith in the evolution of a Polish nation gave way as a new century neared renewed revolutionary fever. Poland was rocked again by doomed insurrections, and short fiction by younger writers veered toward the dark naturalist sensibility of Sienkiewicz. Drawing on continental models, including that of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, and Thomas Hardy, these fin-de-siècle writers, who called themselves Young Poland (Młoda Polska), brought to short stories a surrealistic sense of observation, depicting the ordinary lives of the displaced Polish peasant class in a rapidly industrialized culture, who toiled amid difficult circumstances with little hope of improvement.

The prominent expressions of this movement in short fiction were the early stories of Poland’s second Nobel laureate, Władysław Reymont (1868-1925). Born a peasant and only minimally educated, Reymont early on lived an itinerant life (he tried acting, the monastic life, and factory work) until an injury in a train accident gave him the financial security to settle down; he turned, then, to his first love, writing. He wrote feverishly, producing dozens of stories (before turning to epic-scale novels). The tales depicted the peasant life he knew. They were realistic character studies rich with obvious symbols (for instance, “Bitch” juxtaposes the cruelty of a peasant mother toward her new baby against a stray mutt who fiercely protects her pups). Reymont recorded, with scientific detachment and without heightened literary style, the grim stories of lower-class characters who were unable or unwilling to act nobly. That some aspire to transcend their conditions (usually through the pursuit of money or education or the arts, most often the theater) only made their inevitable failure more ironic. Maria Dąbrowska (1889-1965) echoed a similar socioeconomic vision, but, like Leo Tolstoy, she sought to bring generous heroism to her portrayal of characters locked into limited opportunities because of their class. In her landmark 1926 story cycle, Ludzie stamtąd (Folks from over Yonder), Dąbrowska extolled a populist sense of the virtue of the quiet lives of hard-working peasants that Reymont savaged. Her peasants and laborers, caught between the old rural ways and the new industrial era, are endowed with rich psychologies and emotional nuances (most often through the device of interior monologues) as they struggle for the slenderest insight into the meaning of insignificant lives otherwise ground by routine.

Interbellum Fictions

In 1919, after the concurrent breakdown of the imperial structures of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia, Poland, by armistice provisions set by the Allied governments, was at last accorded the status of a nation-state, although that would last only until its occupation by Russia and then Nazi Germany in 1939. However, three writers whose stories appeared in this interregnum—Bruno Schulz (1892-1942), Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980), and Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969)—vastly expanded Poland’s tradition of literary realism. Although there had been exceptions to that tradition, notably Stefan Grabiński (1887-1926), whose lurid tales of horror have been likened to those of Edgar Allan Poe, these interbellum fictions marked an evolutionary leap for the largely conservative Polish short story.

A retiring public school teacher who lived in solitude in rural eastern Poland, Schulz published only two collections of stories in his brief life (Jewish, the Gestapo shot him during the war): 1934s Sklepy cynamonowe (pb. in the U.K. as Cinnamon Shops, and Other Stories, 1963; PB. in the U.S. as The Street of Crocodiles) and 1937 Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, 1978). Neither readers nor critics were sure what to make of Shultz’s imaginative stories, influenced by the surreal daring of Franz Kafka (Schulz would not gain his international reputation until years after his death). Ostensibly, his stories center on a typical middle-class family, but Schulz freely mingles old-school realism with vivid touches of the phantasmagoric (all leavened with wry humor). With unnerving audacity, reality becomes fluid and ultimately ironic (for instance, in one story, the father, who runs a textile shop, turns into a large blue crab who chases bread crumbs and is eventually cooked to feed the family).

By contrast, Iwaszkiewicz, who began as a poet, reconceived traditional realism by introducing a Proustian sense of the fluidity of time, his characters negotiating with the past, the hunger for loss, and the melancholy process of aging in narratives that subverted linearity. In his story “Brzezina” (“The Birch Grove”), two brothers living in remote woods contend with time: one has just buried his wife, and the other has just found he is soon to die. In another, “Panny z Wilka” (“The Wilko Girls”), an aging World War I veteran, traumatized by his battlefield experiences, returns to a seaside resort he had frequented before the war to rekindle a friendship with two eccentric sisters, only to find that he cannot reclaim the joy of that lost time.

Gombrowicz was the most original and demanding of these interbellum writers (he lived in obscurity until just before his death). Although his international stature would come as a novelist, a young Gombrowicz initially wrote stories as a (reluctant) law student. His early collection, Pamiętnik z okresu dojrzewania (1933; A Memoir Written in Puberty), introduced his signature concerns—provocative subjects formerly taboo even in Poland’s naturalistic canon. Case studies of obsession, sexual license, and the grotesque expressions of emotional frustration and intellectual excess, all framed by a caustic vision of humanity itself as absurd and rendered in a claustrophobic stream-of-consciousness first-person.

Postwar Fictions

Given the magnitude of the devastation from World War II on Poland, the defining short fiction in the decade after the war—the Holocaust fiction of Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski and the spare existential character studies of Marek Hłasko—returned to realism. In 1946, Borowski, haunted by the experiences in the concentration camp archipelago (four years later, he would commit suicide), began writing stories that eventually were collected in This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Other Stories (1967), a cycle of harrowing tales of survival in the camps that, unlike other Holocaust fiction, did not simplify the prisoners into victims or saints. In Borowski’s fiction, relayed in the detached deadpan of one inmate (named Tadeusz), prisoners, caught up in nightmarish circumstances, do anything to survive. In one, a mother ignores the pleas of her child, fearing the SS guards would gas her if they found out she was a mother. In another, a prisoner rummages the suitcases of new arrivals already gassed for clothes to barter for bread. Although critics praised the stark honesty of Borowski’s fiction, the stories shocked the reading public because the stores refused the convenience of clear good and evil.

That same reading public, however, came to lionize with cultlike fanaticism the figure of Marek Hłasko. Indeed, Hłasko emerged in the 1950s as a sort of angry young man-rebel without a cause celebrity (he was a high school dropout, a hard-drinking notorious womanizer in and out of jail, who bore a striking resemblance to James Dean and died young). His stories, centered on troubled loners who—consciously drawing on Humphrey Bogart’s cynicism, Ernest Hemingway’s stoicism, Fyodor Dostoevski’s spiritual depths—struggle to assert an individual moral code in a wider universe that renders such absolutes absurd. Critics outside Poland praised the gritty realism of Hłasko’s stories, especially the 1956 collection Pierwszy krok w chmurach (A First Step in the Clouds), because they rejected the rosy optimism and unblemished working-class heroes of the social realism sanctioned by the entrenched Communist government (indeed Hłasko’s fictions were circulated underground long after his death).

Contemporary Short Fiction

Predictably, the signature short fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, largely speculative and fantasy, reflected a generation of writers expressing their bleak assessments of Soviet-dominated Poland, specifically the chokehold of totalitarian governments (with its illusions of its own grandeur), the growing reliance on dehumanizing technology, and the estrangement from religion and spirituality. In imaginative stories that found wide appeal in Poland and the West, Stanisłlaw Lem and Sławomir Mrozek used science-fiction devices such as alien invasions, interplanetary travel, alternative universes, and dystopian projections to satirize conditions under the Soviet occupation without risking censure or imprisonment. In the tradition of writers who used the fabulous vision of speculative fiction to indict their own age—Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, George Orwell—these visions were dark, cynical, and apocalyptic.

By contrast, the short fictions published in the wake of the liberation of Poland evince a celebration of possibility and a return to Poland’s spiritual roots. Given the rich profusion of short stories published after the tectonic success of the Solidarity movement, any designation of a prominent voice is a risk. However, one writer of short fiction recognized internationally is Olga Tokarczuk. Originally a novelist, Tokarczuk turned to short stories in the mid-1990s, finding the elasticity of the form a better genre to introduce what fascinated herinfusing everyday life with rich elements of mythic symbols, paranormal events, and archetypal characters (she studied Carl Jung while earning a psychology degree) to suggest the fluidity of reality, the solidarity of humanity, and a discernible pattern to events that might otherwise appear to be stochastic. In prose that is richly lyrical and suggestive, her story cycles—1996s Prawiek i inne czasy (Primeval and Other Times, 2010), 1997s Szafa (The Wardrobe), and most spectacularly 1998s Dom dzienny, dom nocny (House of Day, House of Night, 2002) and 2001s Gra na wielu bębenkach (Playing on Many Drums)—suggest, at last, a distinctly Polish voice: realistic and magical, secular and sacred. Her further works include "Yente," published in The New Yorker in 2021, Księgi Jakubowe (2014; The Books of Jacob 2022), and "Opowiadania bizarne" (2018; "Bizarre Stories")

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