Toward the Idea of Polishness: Implications of 1918 for the Former Eastern Galicia, 1918–1939

Abstract

The paper analyzes the Polish literary discourse on the former Habsburg province of Galicia, developing after the restoration of Poland’s independence (1918) and the Polish victory in the Polish-Ukrainian War of Eastern Galicia (1918–1919). Before WWI, especially before the epoch of Galician autonomy (1867–1914), the prevailing discourse on the province was imbued by the idea of multi- and transnationalism grounded upon the Habsburg political culture. After the war, when Galicia became a part of the reborn Poland, the discourse pertaining to the region underwent a fundamental change. In the interwar Polish literature, the idea of multi- and transnational Galicia was a subject of specific transfers: sometimes in a continuative, usually, however, in a deconstructive version. Namely, it was disassembled and its components, referring to a revised political context, were ideologically used to strengthen the representation of reality from the exclusive, Polish point of view. The paper focuses on literary representations of the Polish-Ukrainian War of Eastern Galicia. It discusses the stages of the aforementioned disassemblement, from the idea of Polish-Ruthenian “brotherhood” to the vision of Polish-Polish brotherhood, i.e. the homogenous Polish nation, from which the Others (Ukrainians, Jews and Austrians), depicted as enemies, were excluded with no exception. Such a vision prevailed in the Polish literature up until 1939; it has also had its continuations nowadays.