Wspomnienia żołnierskie, często pisane z „pierwszej linii frontu”, są stałym elementem polskiej literatury wojennej. Sposób przedstawiania wydarzeń wojennych z punktu widzenia piszących żołnierzy znacznie różni się od tego prezentowanego przez innych pisarzy. Działania zbrojne są ich codziennością, a zapis wydarzeń niesie ze sobą obietnicę ukazania realnych przeżyć żołnierskich. Pozwala na to przyjęcie przez autorów jednej z trzech strategii pisania o wojnie: kronikarskiej, propagatorskiej bądź reporterskiej. Charakterystyczne dla tych pamiętników jest także łączenie dwóch przeciwstawnych sposobów opisu wojny: ułańskiego westernu i wojny jako rzezi.
EN
Soldiers' memoirs, often written from the front line, are a constant feature of Polish war literature. The events of war, written from the soldiers’ point of view, are presented in different way than those that were written by writers with no experience of war. Armed conflict was their daily experience, and their diaries impart a real sense of what it is to be a soldier. Soldiers had three possible strategies in writing about war - chronicler, propagator, or reporter. Often they linked two opposing perspectives of war - nobility and slaughter.
This paper aims at defining the features of literature of reminiscence, especially of works related to the Second World War. The analysis is based on two memoirs: „Mój wrzesień 1939” [„My September 1939”] by Marian Jędo and „Inną drogą” [„Another way”] by Wiesław Widloch. The texts shows how the authors share their experiences/stories with recipients. As noted by Hayden White, it is impossible to get an objective image of past events, but one can analyze the way these events were experienced and described. As a consequence, the paper starts with theoretical considerations about the functioning of both historical narration and narration of reminiscence in contemporary historical and Literature theses, and also among the recipients of historical books. In fact it is worth mentioning the connection between the research on literature of reminiscence and microhistory studies. In both cases the key issue is to focus on the life of a selected person and to see the world from his or her perspective. Among the research methods used in the present work one can find not only methods defined in the literature dedicated to memoirs analysis but also methods created by historians representing historicism.