Bunt Rojstów

The Rojsty Rebellion is a collection of reportages published by Józef Mackiewicz in the Vilnius daily Słowo in the years 1936–1937 and subsequently published in a single volume in 1938. According to Włodzimierz Bolecki the book is the “mother” of all of the author’s later writings. It is also a predecessor of the post-war school of Polish reportage. The Rojsty Rebellion transcends the framework of generic writing, becoming a new, fecund form of modern literature. In the centre of the text is the reporter himself in various roles: narrator, keen observer, critical commentator, subtle landscapist and, finally, a traveller by ship on a river, for instance, or on a crowded bus or country wagon. The eponymous rojsty is a regional name for describing swampy terrains and simultaneously a synecdoche for the north-eastern terrains of the Second Polish Republic. These are the Kresy, that is the eastern borderlands, which impress the author with their wilderness and the diversity of the national minorities who inhabit them, but also lead to a feeling of uncertainty connected with the economic and social processes that Mackiewicz observes visiting its villages and towns. Their exotic periphery (“We go to Mistrycz as if we were going to Zanzibar or Tanganyika”) is a result of civilisational backwardness, but also the neglect of the central authorities. The reporter records the conversations of simple people, creates empathetic portraits of them, confronts the optimism of the state propaganda slogans with the uncertain reality, contrasts the natural order with the chaos of human endeavours. Delight is mixed with anxiety: the stagnation of the Kresy is contrasted with the dynamism of the neighbouring Soviet Union, bureaucracy and superficial modernisation destroy a traditional way of life, nationalism breaks up local social ties. The Rojsty Rebellion is thus a polemic with a vision of the Kresy as a “very happy idyll”, as well as a defence of a different “native land” and the first testimony to Mackiewicz’s unique patriotic landscape. The Road to Nowhere is Józef Mackiewicz’s first novel. The author began writing it during World War II, and it was finally published in London in 1955. The story takes place during the Soviet occupation in Poland’s eastern territories, primarily in Vilnius, which is never directly named, from the winter of 1940 to the summer of the following year. The collective hero of the novel is the multinational, diversified society, forced to take a stand against the enslavement that cannot be described in a traditional manner or schemas. The Red Army represents physical violence, but it is primarily terror of a new type, represented by Bolshevik ideology imposed by its propaganda (“concentrated lies”).