W niniejszym wstępie zaprezentowano cele przyświecające organizatorom seminarium naukowego „Dyskurs postkolonialny, postzależnościowy i posttotalitarny w literaturze i kulturze państw Europy Środkowej i Wschodniej”, zorganizowanego w roku 2022 na Uniwersytecie Śląskim. Zawarto także krótką charakterystykę kultury i aktualnego położenia państw tego regionu. Autor wstępu omawia w skrócie najważniejsze tezy i wnioski zgromadzonych w tomie artykułów.

This article attempts to critically analyze the postcolonial aspects of the concept of the Other/Alien from the Polish point of view in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. In the (sub)consciousness of Polish elites, (geo)political discourse acts as a link between ‘postcolonial aspects’ and the war context. The author considers as postcolonial aspects those features of the Polish public debate that go hand in hand with resentment thinking. Although the inherent descriptive parameter of resentment consciousness is considered to be the binary category of Other/Alien, in the case of the Polish self-perception system it is more appropriate to speak of a trinary relational system (Poland — West — East). The entanglement of the Polish habitus in a trinary relation is not conducive to the process of status positioning in the world.

The article discusses the depiction of the history of Latvia of the twentieth century in Yelena Katishonok’s novel Kogda ukhodit chelovek (2011). Although the work does not mention the name of the country or the city in which the action of the novel is set, it can nevertheless be recognised by numerous markers, mainly
topographical ones. At the centre of the narrative the author has placed the story of one house and its inhabitants. Each of the characters experiences their joys and sorrows, and their individual fates are superimposed on the history of Latvia between 1927 and 1991. This is a novel about loss: the welcoming, tolerant state of the interwar period will not return, even after the restoration of independence in 1991.

Aleksandra Zywert’s analysis in this article is concerned with modern Belarusian writer Artur Klinov’s Minsk: A Guide to the City of the Sun. With its skillful handling of the post-imperial themes, Minsk is both an anatomy of imperialism and an attempt to process it by telling the story of the capital of Belarus, a space specific in its undeniable symbolism. The convention of internal autobiography has allowed Klinov not only to convey the scope of the post-Soviet trauma and suggest a way to come to terms with it, but also to recover his own identity as a Belarusian.

Choucas, a lesser-known novel by Zofia Nałkowska published in 1927, directs the criticism and irony against the imperial politics of France and Spain of the early 20th century. The article addresses the way in which this criticism is formulated, the working assumption being that it is important not only to decipher the historical contexts that Nałkowska uses in her work, or her private views on the issues of war and colonization (an examination of these issues was undertaken by Włodzimierz Wójcik), but also to analyze the language used by the novel’s protagonists, Mrs. de Carfort and Mr. Carrizales, to defend, justify or praise colonial policies. In particular, the meaning of two adjectives, “exotic” and “racial,” is analyzed in detail; they are used very frequently in the narrative, usually to characterize the appearance of the characters. The author puts forth the hypothesis that this abundant use of these two words does not simply manifest stylistic deficiencies of the novel or a kind of unconscious mannerism of Nałkowska, but a way of criticizing concepts which she, Nałkowska, identifies and regards as empty signifiers. Absorbing various meanings in the course of the narrative and occurring in ever-changing contexts, these words reveal their arbitrariness and unrepresentability.

In this article, Paulina Wójcikowska-Wantuch analyzes the presence of postcolonial discourse in A Volga Tale, a novel by Guzel Yakhina, a Russian author of Tatar origin, whose fiction is concerned with themes of history and identity. Yakhina focuses on the tragic events of the Soviet period shown from the perspective of a single person and her fictions represent the post-memory trend in literature. She stresses the cultural and linguistic distinctness of the German minority, which ultimately fell victim to Stalin’s imperialistic policy. Yakhina exposes the destructive mechanisms of the imperial power, but refrains from unambiguous assessments of
historical reality. She focuses on the problem of responsibility for one’s neighbors, emphasizing the importance of the characters’ individual choices. In the light of the ethical issues raised in the novel, the problem of national identity is of secondary importance. In connection with the above, A Volga Tale and also other novels by Yakhina elude any unambiguous assignment to postcolonial literature.

Asia Voloshina’s latest play, Crime, has been written during Russia’s current and ongoing war against Ukraine. Voloshina places her tragic heroine and other characters in the space of text messages to family, friends, a loved one and amidst authentic media reports about the war. Thus, the action of the play takes place on a smartphone screen. In this article, Crime is addressed in the context of the evolving view of Russia and Russians and in relation to earlier works by Voloshina, Гибнет хор, Дания тюрьма, Человек из рыбы and Подтвердите, что вы еловек. The interpretation has been extended to include the notion of necro-imperialism as defined by Nikolai Karpicki.

Dorota Masłowska’s novel White and Red is analysed through a post-dependence lens. It examines the phenomenon of abrogation, i.e. refusal of all categories of imposed culture. The protagonists manifest their national identity through an aggressive negation of what is ‘Russkie’, therefore alien. The character of the ‘Russky’- -enemy, is obsessively shaped into various configurations, incarnations and types, which are hard to put into definite categories.

Jelena Gremina’s verbatim drama 150 Reasons Not to Defend the Homeland (2013) deals with the political and existential experience of the present while ostensibly referring the historical events. The tragic history of the fifteenth century (the conquest of Constantinople by Ottomans and the end of the Byzantine Empire) is presented through the perspective of an individual who, in a moment of danger and under the threat of violence and enslavement, has to devise his own survival strategy, preserve their identity in the face of state-imposed values and choose either to make a deal with the conscience or die. The attitudes of the invaders (who praise violence), of the citizens threatened by loss of statehood, and of the witnesses of the oncoming tragedy reveal mechanisms of subjection, surrendering responsibility and conscience, and the devaluation of human life and moral principles.

In his article, Marek Ochrem discusses the issue of control over society in Vladimir Voinovich’s dystopian novel Moscow 2042 against the background of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. The analysis focuses on methods of subordinating people to the will of the rulers and manipulating them. Ochrem is interested in the impact of the oppressive features of the fictional city-state on citizens: the cult of personality (Genialissimus), poor living conditions, the threat of deportation of dissidents, lack of access to information and entertainment, influencing the shape of the family, promoting universal spying, using religion for propaganda purposes, and censorship. Ochrem also shows analogies between the worlds of fictional dystopian and totalitarian regimes and actual ones.

The aim of this article is to analyze three works by Estonian writer Jaan Kross by taking into account postcolonial research (Between Three Plagues, Michelson’s Matriculation and Stones from Heaven). In all of them, the main characters, who are of Estonian origin, do a lot to give themselves and their compatriots subjectivity, and thus free themselves from the position of a person dominated by invaders and colonizers. These characters try to speak in their own voice; they want to stop being subalterns. In these stories, the role of the colonizers is played primarily by the German-speaking population, and to a lesser extent by the Russians. Although the action is set in three different centuries, the problems faced by Estonians are similar and are related to political, civilizational and cultural subordination.

The article discusses and  critically analyses, and evaluates the publication of Nikolai Epple An Inconvenient Past. Memory of State Crimes in Russia and Other Countries, published in Moscow in 2020. Both the substantive and formal aspects of the monograph were analyzed.