Travellogues

The development of travel writing in a national literature is closely related to the
geographical and mental cartography that characterizes that territory. This article
investigates Latvian travelogues of the Soviet era as encounters with other nations
within the Soviet empire in order to analyze the role of Latvian travel writings in
shaping a feeling of belonging to the empire. In addition to fostering obedience and
a sense of belonging to the Soviet empire during the first 15 oppressive years of the
Soviet regime, Latvian travelogues of the later years represented the Soviet empire
as a conflictual site of the destruction of traditional values and landscapes.

CAPTURED IN THE FOCUS OF HISTORY. SYLWIA SIEDLECKA'S REPORTAGES ON BUL-GARIA. The article analyses Polish writer Sylwia Siedlecka's collection of reportages entitled Złote piachy (Golden Dusts) against the background of other modes of writing about Bulgaria, developed within the last decade. The comparison outlines the particular positioning of Siedlecka's report-ages as texts in which the cultural dichotomy East-West loses its importance. The weakening of those categories is achieved not only on the conceptual level of the book, but also by the author's affective writing style. The demythologization of Bulgaria's imaginary geography leads to a more stable embedding of the presented facts and events on the timeline of the country's history. Sie-dlecka's reportages, based on the biographies of the characters depicted in them, may be perceived as elements of a greater story about the problematic existence of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Pierwsze profesjonalne reportaże o Bułgarii w języku polskim powstają na początku XX wie-ku. Od tego czasu pojawiają się i kształtują różne sposoby opowiadania o tym kraju, choć nie składają się one na piśmiennictwo o pokaźnych rozmiarach. Tą tematyką zajmują się pisarze i dziennikarze o różnych przekonaniach i poglądach-od Tadeusza Stanisława Grabow-skiego poczynając, na Lesławie Bartelskim i Wilhelmie Machu kończąc. XXI wiek przynosi zdecydowany odwrót zarówno od tradycji rozwijających się przed II wojną światową, jak i od tendencji powojennych. Celem niniejszego szkicu jest wskazanie i omówienie kolejnej zmiany w piśmiennictwie reportażowym, która dokonała się za sprawą opublikowanego w 2019 roku tomu Złote piachy. Zbioru reportaży Sylwii Siedleckiej nie da się przyporząd-kować do żadnego z wypracowanych w ostatniej dekadzie sposobów pisania o Bułgarii. Choć autorka odwiedza różne zakątki kraju (wyjeżdża do jego południowych krańców-do miejscowości Rupite koło Petriczu, gdzie żyła i pracowała jasnowidzka Wanga; wybiera się w góry-dociera do szczytu Buzłudża, żeby odwiedzić opuszczony Dom-Pomnik Bułgar-skiej Partii Komunistycznej), jej opowieść nie przyciąga czytelników obietnicą przygody,

Th is paper explores the intertextual relationships between the Greek novel O Πίθηκος Ξουθ (1848) by Iakovos Pitsipios and two German short stories: Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann (1814) by E. T. A. Hoff mann and Der junge Engländer oder der Aff e als Mensch (1827) by W. Hauff. Th e aim of this investigation is to explore the integration of the Greek novel into the European literary context of simian narratives based on a common cultural tradition. Research to date has demonstrated intertextuality between Pitsipios and Hoff mann, but specifi c common motifs had not previously been discussed. Furthermore, no relationship between Pitsipios and Hauff has yet been identi-fi ed. Th is work focuses on three recurring motifs in simian narratives: 'shoes', 'razors', and 'England'. Furthermore, it suggests a connection between the human animal and the broader theme of the dual self, which was very popular in nineteenth-century literature due to the historical circumstances and intellectual trends of the era.

W artykule omówiono zbiór reportaży Złote piachy (2019), konfrontując go z innymi sposobami pisania o Bułgarii, wypracowanymi w ostatniej dekadzie. Porównanie to pokazuje wyjątkowe miejsce, jakie reportaże Sylwii Siedleckiej zajmują jako teksty, w których kategorie Wschód – Zachód tracą na znaczeniu. Ich osłabienie zostaje osiągnięte nie tylko na poziomie koncepcyjnym tomu, lecz także dzięki afektywnemu stylowi pisarskiemu autorki. Demityzacja geografii wyobrażonej prowadzi do stabilniejszego osadzenia tekstów na osi czasu. Reportaże, osnute wokół biografii przedstawionych w nich postaci, opowiadają o długim trwaniu Bułgarskiej Republiki Ludowej.

The book 'Socjalistyczny postkolonializm. Rekonsolidacja pamięci' (Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation) is about the Polish postcolonial tradition of before 1989, which has been blanked out of memory. The year 2000, i.e., the year in which the Polish translation of Ewa Thompson’s book Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonialism appeared, is taken as the beginning of Polish postcolonial thought. However, the general thesis of the present book is that widely understood postcolonialism functioned in Poland before 1989. The real beginning of thinking in postcolonial terms started with the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, held in Wrocław in 1948. The purpose of the book is to reconstruct the rubbed out history of socialist postcolonialism and to determine the reasons why this cultural phenomenon was remembered/forgotten. This first task is achieved by analyzing political, press, literary, scientific and artistic discourses referring to the so-called Third World and its relations with the semi-peripheral Second World, i.e., Poland; while the second task is treated within an original conceptual framework for writing about remembering/forgetting, using the category of re/consolidation drawn from neuroscience and psychology. The work uses the terms “socialist postcolonialism” and “postcolonialism of the Second World” alternately and refers to postcolonial studies, although conceptually it is rooted in memory studies which are also seeing intense development in Poland.

As Giorgio Maria Nicolai has illustrated in his regesta of Italian travelogues from Soviet Union (Sovietlandia. Viaggiatori italiani nell’Unione Sovietica, 2009), many Italian intellectuals visited Russia from the beginning of the Soviet revolution till the end of the Cold War. In this paper, I aim to analyse and compare a selection of travelogues written during the so-called ‘Italian Reconstruction’ (approximately between 1945 and 1960) by Libero Bigiaretti, Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Danilo Dolci, Tommaso Fiore, Carlo Levi and Anna Maria Ortese.
Moving between clichéd statements about USSR and, on the other hand, acute as well as unexpected annotations, these written testimonies are essential to understand the political tendency in the aftermath of the Second World War and, in some cases, the influence of the so-called ‘Third Ways’. Elaborated around 1920s, those political paths started from the problem of poverty, in the attempt of solving the aporia between liberalism (in his moral, not in his economic/Keynesian sense) and Communism.
What unifies the analysed travelogues is indeed the idea of poverty, strictly related to the political context. They demonstrate how the Russian experience informs the way Italian intellectuals reconsider poverty in Italy, with a peculiar attention to the ‘Southern Question’ and the ‘Peasant Question’.
Starting from the idea of Russia emerging from these pages, it is possible to shed new light on what happened in the so-called ‘Italian Reconstruction’.