Wokół lwowskiej edycji Pokoju na poddaszu… Wandy Wasilewskiej (1940)
Around the Lviv’s Edition of Pokój na Poddaszu by Wanda Wasilewska (1940)

Summary/Abstract: The article revolves around the reedition of a youth novel A Room in the Attic (Pokój na poddaszu, 1939) by Wanda Wasilewska, published under the Soviet occupation of Lviv by the Kiev-Lviv National Minorities State Publishing USSR in 1940. It attempts to place it on the background of the entirety of the modest release production of this publishing house in the area of belles-lettres in the years 1940–1941 (among 181 published books only 26 literary positions, including only 7 from Polish literature), pointing most of all to the changes made by the Soviet censorship in regards to the pre-war original (especially the elimination of all mentions of Poland and liberation fights, pejorative descriptions of Russian people in the context of the remembering of 1905 revolution, mentions of religion, the words “pan” and “pani” (lord and lady), and – by adding a few sentences not present in the original – bolstering the “class” context of the text and changing the expression of the ending from moderately optimistic to pessimistic). The post-war reeditions of the novel by Wasilewska in PPR (from 1946–1988) restored the pre-war integral version of the text, rendering the cut-down and changed Lviv version invalid, and making it a documentation of its times.

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