"Kultura": Political Resistance Through Literature, Cultural Memory, and Transnational Networks

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Affiliate Organization: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America

Brief Description

On the occasion of the thirtieth anniverary of the Polish-language magazine Kultura Jósef Czapski, one of its co-founders and earliest contributors, emphasized that the magazine’s main focus was not culture, as was suggested by its title, but politics. Culture became an umbrella, which allowed them to pursue their political goals without getting bogged down in political infighting typical of political self-organization in exile.
This emphasis on the political rather than cultural and literary profile of Kultura belies that the magazine published an enormous amount of literature as well as poetry. We owe to Kultura the emergence and prolific existence in the difficult conditions of exile of a great constellation of talents of Polish literature and culture of the second half of the 20th century: Witold Gombrowicz, Czesław Miłosz, Józef Czapski, Jerzy Stempowski, Konstanty Jeleński, Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Stanisław Vincenz, Leszek Kołakowski, Zbigniew Herbert. Moreover, Kultura also published Pasternak, Akhmatova, Sinyavski, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell, and Koestler as well as the highly influential anthology of Ukrainian poetry by Yuriy Lavrynenko The Gunned Down Renaissance. Grudzinska-Gross has shown that during the most radical period of totalitarian rule “resistance consisted of remembering” (Grudzinska-Gross 1987: 387). It is no coincidence that much of the literature published by Kultura, was concerned with the preservation of memory in the face of the mass oblivion promoted by the 20th century totalitarian regimes.
The roundtable speakers will explore the connections between memory, culture, literatur, transnationalism and political resistance as they were manifested on the pages of Kultura.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Julie Hansen, Uppsala U (Sweden)

Roundtable Speakers

• Irena Grudzinska Gross, Polish Academy of Sciences (Poland)

• Zakhar Ishov, Uppsala U (Sweden)

• Tadeusz Jerzy Koczanowicz, The New School

• Ilaria Sicari, Ca' Foscari U of Venice (Italy)

• Alissa Valles, Boston U