„Garnca pańskiej kaszy chłopska krew niewarta”, czyli o wyzwoleniu włościan w Słowie o Jakubie Szeli Brunona Jasieńskiego
How Much Is The Peasant Blood Worth? On the Emancipation of Peasants in Bruno Jasieński’s The Tale of Jakub Szela

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes the politics of the Tale of Jakub Szela (Słowo o Jakubie Szeli, 1926) by Bruno Jasieński. The second long poem of the most renowned Polish futurist investigates mechanisms of the mythology of power in the 1920s Poland. Discussing the entanglements of historiography in the power apparatus, one may trace how Jasieński’s work exercises the hegemonic discourse on the Peasant Uprising of 1846 in Galicia, proposing to use this historical event as a positive story about emancipation and the nucleus for the new community. In his poem, Jasieński discusses the suppressing attributes of nationalist historiography and explores possibilities to overcome its hegemonic claims to universalism. From this tension arise Jasieński’s questions about what we should consider common or collectively shared and how unconventional historiography and politics of aesthetics should be used during the struggle for reconfiguring the prevalent ways of being together in social context.

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