Die kosmopolitische Vorstellungswelt in der polnischen Literatur, ca. 1800-1939
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The main question the proposed research sought to answer was: in what ways have Polishspeaking writers and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries embraced supranational ideas of cultural and ethnic diversity in their articulations of community and collective identity? The three-year project was divided into three work packages, each intended to take around 12 months. These were organized chronologically and thematically: (1) the early-to-mid nineteenth century (the romantic period) (2) the mid-to-late nineteenth century (the realist and nationalist period) (3) and the early twentieth century (the modernist period). In the curtailed time spent on the project, work was carried out on the first two packages, with a thematic focus on travel writing and orientalism. The project found that different strands of Polish orientalism in the nineteenth century constituted multiple cosmopolitan discourses, which intertwined in complex ways with western European orientalism, Poland’s own historical contacts with the east (especially the Ottoman Empire, its long-time neighbour), and anti-colonial defiance after the partitions of the Polish- Commonwealth. Polish orientalism was of a different nature in different parts of the world. Ukraine was treated as a kind of frontier; here, traces of the Orient were still visible after a period of Ottoman rule in Podolia at the end the seventeenth century, Tatar influence was historically strong, and the Ukrainian-speaking Slav peasantry appeared as a familiar-butdifferent Other. Polish writers orientalized Ukraine and Ukrainians at the same time as they ventured further east. In the Caucasus, on the other hand, Polish intellectuals found themselves in exile and in the service (often enforced) of the Russian state: their written accounts combined elements of western European orientalism with a sui generis Polish anti-imperialism. A cosmopolitan striving to self-ascribe ‘Europeanness’ is visible in both corpuses of writing, but the different imperial pressures acting in the two regions result in divergent articulations of identity and culture. The project also yielded an opportunity to work on an edited volume on a related theme. The book, with the working title Multicultural Commonwealth: Diversity and Difference in Poland-Lithuania and its Successor States – is the first in-depth study in English of the cultural history and afterlife of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It brings together the expertise of worldrenowned scholars in a mixture of disciplines to present a broad overview of how pluralism and diversity have been understood both in historical Poland-Lithuania, its later partitioned regions, and its successor states – Belarus, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine.
