Słowa na końcu świata: opowieści o Bieszczadach
Words at the End of the World: a Story about the Bieszczady Mts.

Summary/Abstract: A text about the phenomenon of the Bieszczady belles letters, which emerged in the course of the past decade. These works comprise an affirmation of life in the Bieszczady Mts. seen through the personal perspective and experiences of the authors, who even when reaching for fictionalisation remain documentalists of the Bieszczady lifestyle and create an image of the region. An acquaintance with this prose, written both in the spirit of the imagery and myths about this distant part of Poland (i.a. the myth of a land of mellowness, the pioneer-cowboy myth, the myth of an uninhabited wilderness, the multicultural myth) and countering both approaches, demonstrates the operations involved in constructing the Bieszczady self-presentation and rendering indelible regional specificity in such a manner so that the reader rejects all associations with fiction. The author pondered on the status of the literary work as seen by an anthropologist and proposed reflecting on anthropological methods of analysing literature – the product of culture of interest to him. In doing so she advised approaching written narration perceived as cultural praxis and a form of activity. The Bieszczady example illustrates the purposes of the literary text, the way in which it assists the interpretation of the context and aids the cognitive process in those cases when we are particularly interested in self-presentation practices and narrations about the past, i.e. the way people portray themselves and what they want to say about themselves to others, not only to anthropologists.

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