The Literary “No” to Politically Tabooed Topics during the Polish People’s Republic. The Case of Tadeusz Konwicki’s Prose Writing

Abstract

Using the example of characteristic works by Tadeusz Konwicki, one of the main post-war Polish writers, the article discusses literary ways of taking up topics functioning in the Polish People’s Republic as political taboos. War and post-war relations with the Soviet Union, the fate of Polish inhabitants of the eastern borderlands, the motif of the Home Army struggle against the Soviet army altogether constituted a proscribed area of interest. The analysis shows how the literary resistance against silencing, expressed through allusions, understatements, the poetics of traumatic realism and the grotesque — makes the writer an agent of collective memory.