Polska moich rodziców
Poland of My Parents

Summary/Abstract: ”In 1956 Witold Gombrowicz predicted that once com- munism in Poland collapses, the Poles will be already changed and never return to their nineteenth-century national imagery. This prophecy pertains to my genera- tion – but not to those of its members who today march in the costumes of the Piłsudskiites or the national de- mocrats. Ifind both those traditions equally alien. And Imuch prefer the tradition of Wojtyła, Mazowiecki, Tischner, Kuroń and Michnik. (…) This vision of amar- tyred nation, associated with the suffering of Christ and bringing freedom to the whole world, has for two hun- dred years burdened the Polish consciousness in the manner of aphantom. The twentieth-century critics of this tradition – such as Czesław Miłosz – blame it for fa- vouring national idolatry and the creation of aperverse megalomania of suffering and acult of death. After 1956 the young generation wished to cast off this mes- sianistic burden and to turn towards life. The same go- al was pursued by successive Polish generations – the generation of ’68 and the Solidarity generation – in the- ir efforts of curing themselves of the national complex in which an awareness of inferiority gives rise to mega- lomania” – wrote Tadeusz Sobolewski.

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