The Space of the Living and the Dead through the Prism of Individual Memory in A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski

Abstract

This paper analyzes the novel by the contemporary Polish writer Wiesław Myśliwski, who debuted in the post-war period as a representative of the peasant prose movement. The book follows the fate of a man whose life is shaped by major historical events that catalyze the transformation and disintegration of both material reality and the spiritual realm. The study focuses on the novel’s artistic space, examined through the prism of the key antinomies that define Myśliwski’s poetics: the living/the dead and dream/reality. Narrated in the first person, the text takes the form of an “oral monologue” whose polyphony arises from the delegation of the narrative voice. The framing composition and the author’s narrative strategy create a domain of continuous storytelling grounded in categories central to Myśliwski’s artistic worldview: the word, memory, and imagination. Time in the novel is cyclical, structured according to the workings of autobiographical memory. The article also investigates the system of leitmotifs, in which the motifs of light, the word, and ritual perform a structuring function within the realms of the living and the dead. The narrator’s passage between the novel’s various levels of artistic space is examined through a plotline that crosses the boundary between opposing existential states of the human being.

Received: 05.08.2025.
Revised: 15.02.2026.
Accepted: 17.03.2026.

Citation
Libina I. A. The Space of the Living and the Dead through the Prism of Individual Memory in A Treatise on Shelling Beans by Wiesław Myśliwski // Slavic Almanac. 2026. No 1–2. P. 340–350 (in Russian). DOI: 10.31168/2073-5731.2026.1-2.18