"Nie dać się uwieść", czyli o zwodniczości mitu heroicznego
‘Resisting seduction’, or, the deceptiveness of a heroic myth

Summary/Abstract: In the proposed analysis of Stanisław Dygat’s novel Jezioro Bodeńskie [‘Lake Constance’], the focus has been shifted to the marginalised issue of wartime (in)experience in the formation of virility. Entangled in a discourse of Polish heroism, the novel’s central character wrestles with (a male) identity, since denial of a national paradigm evokes a question about one’s own gender. This individual situates himself between the figure of Mother-Homeland (Poland) and Goddess-Liberty (France) who enforce upon him to take part in a spectacle that underpins the fiction of gender. He becomes involved in a seduction discourse which is characteristic to nations whose identity is put under threat. This analysis shows how this character, a hysterical Pole, is defendnig himself against a heroic myth he is being seduced by.

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