„Kraj, w którym niegdyś…” Identyfikacja regionalna w podróżopisarstwie kresowym w okresie międzypowstaniowym
“A Country where One Day…” Regional Identification in the Travel Writing of the Borderlands in the Period between the Uprisings

Summary/Abstract: The author’s first thesis is that in Polish culture the myth of the Eastern Borderlands - “{Kresy}” (Eastern Polish lands that since the end of the eighteenth century belonged to Russia, and nowadays are divided among Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania) originated outside this region. It was formed by the political emigration of the time or the culture of Central Poland. It is necessary to verify this myth by studying the images of the Borderlands created by writers who grew up, lived and were active there. The second thesis has it that the poetics of literature on the Borderlands, analyzed by E. Czaplejewicz and J. Kolbuszewski, should include the concepts of Poland’s history, and the East-West affiliations in its historiographical thought. The author surveyes the recollections of traveling through Kresy written in the 1840’s and 1850’s. These are texts by S. Buszczyński, Z. Fisz, M. Grabowski, I. Hołowiński, L.A. Jucewicz, J.I. Kraszewski, A. Marcinkowski, L. Potocki, A. Przeździecki, W. Syrokomla, K. Tyszkiewicz. Travelling through ONE’S OWN territory mirrored the writers’ sense of regional identity. The idea of regionalism combined different attitudes: administrative, pragmatical, and emotionally-historical. In the southern and northern Borderlands the writers focused on the traces of historical tribe: the Scythians. Journeys constituted confrontations of the contemporary world, in which Russia added to the progress of civillisation, with the world described by Herodotus. The descriptions of these journeys proved that the authors were living on the Scythians’ land and that they were Scythians’ descendants. The memory of the Scythians’ land formed the basis of regional identity in this territory.

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