Abstract
Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova’s Coming of Age Under Martial Law tackles the putative identity crisis of a generation of Poles through analysis of a broad range of popular novels by writers born between 1960 and 1975. According to Vassileva-Karagyozova, these writers and their works give expression to the key dilemmas and anxieties of Poland’s ‘transitional generation’, whose coming of age coincided with the dramatic political and social changes of the 1980s. Too young to have played any decisive part in the Solidarity revolution and yet old enough to remember the communist system, the individual members of this generation have supposedly experienced a peculiar existential malaise in the post-1989 period, caught between old and new social structures and codes. Vassileva-Karagyozova aims to reveal the nature and origins of this malaise through interpretations of popular fiction from the first decade of the new millennium. In short, she uses literature to explain a set of social phenomena.
Vassileva-Karagyozova begins the book with an interesting discussion of various attempts by public figures and intellectuals from the ‘displaced generation of the children of Martial Law’ to define their situation and even to explain their apparent lack of a clear generational identity. There is something ‘different’ about this generation, separating it from both the triumphant elder generation of Solidarity campaigners and the younger generation with no memory of communism. Vassileva-Karagyozova argues that members of the transitional generation have struggled with the traumatic effects of social and political turmoil in the formative maturation period of their lives. At the same time, they have sought to reject the classic Polish construction of generational identity on the basis of heroic sacrifice for the collective. Vassileva-Karagyozova views the literary productions of this generation as vehicles for formulating this new identity.
The main substantive chapters of the book focus, respectively, on four issues: ‘arrested maturation’ amid political turmoil; complexes associated with absent or abusive fathers; destructive relationships with ‘mother-demons’; and the rejection or individualization of religious faith and practice. The overarching argument is that the dramatic events of the 1980s – from the Solidarity revolution and martial law to the Round Table Talks and the first free elections – exerted a deforming influence on the psychological development and social interactions of Poles belonging to the ‘transitional generation’. The political circumstances interrupted the crucial maturation period in their lives, while the social pressures of life under a repressive communist regime created pathologies in relations between children and their parents. This breakdown of traditional family relations was also an important cause of an apparent turn away from Catholicism, especially in its social dimensions. Vassileva-Karagyozova draws on various theories of childhood development and family relations to explain these general phenomena, treating the novels under analysis largely as illustrations of social and psychological pathologies.
Vassileva-Karagyozova’s approach is ambitious. In essence, she attempts to create a collective psycho-social profile for masses of individual Poles born between 1960 and 1975. This approach sometimes produces insupportable overgeneralizations, especially in the strong claims made about how large groups of people supposedly thought or even felt: ‘Polish women felt betrayed and abandoned by their husbands because they continued to carry the image of man as the head of the family’ (p. 107). These claims are probably defensible in the narrow context of the novels to which Vassileva-Karagyozova refers, but she does not provide enough sociological evidence to extend these interpretations beyond the realm of literary analysis.
Conversely, Vassileva-Karagyozova does not seem especially interested in any of the novels she examines as works of creative literature, but only as evidence of broader psychological and sociological phenomena. After an early discussion of the Bildungsroman, the book contains little strictly literary analysis, and there is only limited interest in stylistic or linguistic elements. Literature is treated largely as data for socio-psychological research. Of course, works of literature – especially such a broad cross-section – inevitably tell us something about their authors and the preoccupations of the societies in which they are produced. Therefore, many of Vassileva-Karagyozova’s observations on changes in Polish society are intriguing and thought-provoking, while the commonalities she identifies across diverse works give a clear picture of certain currents in contemporary Polish literature.
Despite its occasional shortcomings, Svetlana Vassileva-Karagyozova’s Coming of Age Under Martial Law makes a useful contribution to scholarship on Polish culture after 1989.