“To Travel (Without) Stumbling over the History...”: Central Europe and the Balkans in Andrzej Stasiuk’s Travelogues

Abstract

The article is devoted to the travel prose related to the space of the Central European province and the Balkans by Andrzej Stasiuk, one of the leading contemporary Polish writers. It’s primarily about travelogues “On the Way to Babadag” (2004), “Fado” (2006) and “Diary Written Later” (2010), the analysis of which makes it possible to trace the change of the author’s narrative strategy in connection with the desire to avoid the historical dimension of the described space (“On the Way to Babadag”, “Fado”) or, on the contrary, to experience it as fully as possible (“A Diary Written Later”). The key categories for the narrator’s perception of the periphery of Central and South-Eastern Europe are decay and timelessness, and the text-forming emotions are melancholy (“On the Way to Babadag”, “Fado”) and fear (“A Diary Written Later”). Ways of reconstructing the path and the memory of it, narrator’s self-perception as his own / alien in relation to the experienced space are analyzed, as well as an attempt to avoid the historical perspective (which allows to achieve the illusion of spatial balance in the East / West semantic field painful for the Polish mentality) and, on the contrary, the experience of collision with History. The experience of the memory of the Balkan space about the war leads the narrator of the “Diary Written Later” to realize the impossibility of avoiding reflection on the burden of Polish mentality and Polish collective memory based on the cult of martyrology.

Received: 06.02.2025.
Revised: 11.02.2025.
Accepted: 18.03.2025.

Citation
Adel’geym I. Ye. “To Travel (Without) Stumbling over the History...”: Central Europe and the Balkans in Andrzej Stasiuk’s Travelogues // Slavic Almanac. 2025. No 1–2. P. 309–324 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2025.1-2.14