Zobaczyć - opisać - zrozumieć : polskie reportaże literackie o rosyjskim imperium

Abstract

The book represents an attempt at both constructing and describing a genre-related model - literary reportage - as well as an attempt at verifying the properties of this model on the basis of the material constituted by the Polish reportages about the Russian empire. The reportage literature constitutes a considerable collection of writings. The writings of this kind and the reflection devoted to them has a considerable tradition. Over the years many varieties of such writings were developed. My attention was attracted by reportage because it is a form of writing which constitutes a clear alternative to the leading currents of modernity; because it is a type of literature which respects the reader and whose authors remember that people are fond of listening to stories about the more remote and the less remote worlds, about our world and a different world. By constructing the eponymous triad: To see - to describe - to understand, I intended to make manifest that these three verbs constitute the essence of the genre in which I am interested. Therefore I drew up a register of the texts of Polish reportage writers from the inter-war period until the modern times. I described the books of authors who travelled beyond the eastern frontier in order to demonstrate the significance of the individual manner of perceiving reality in literary reportage, for this private manner of looking at things and the intellectual expertise and the books that one read determine the form of the texts – the way in which the reporter will describe the object of his interest. Understanding in literary reportage should be construed in two ways. Firstly, the reporter himself must understand the world at which he or she looks and about which he or she tells a story. Secondly, he or she should be able to effectively share this knowledge with the reader. In the subsequent parts of the text I attempt to demonstrate the way in which reporters, who describe the otherness of the Russian empire and its inhabitants, are able to bring out also the features which are similar to ours. I also strive to prove that it is impossible, despite the attempts that are made, to avoid stereotypes. However, it is possible to ask questions about the phenomenon of Russianness. I devoted the final parts of the book to the features, roles and motivations of the Russian subject, and also to the clear manifestations of the essayisation of form (subjective reflection, a two-fold directed dialogicity, the art of language apart from the transparency of the language, which is a prerequisite for the reportage form), for I believe that in the texts that I research one may discern the process of the interpenetration of the essayistic, reportagerelated and the strictly fictional elements.