Visions of Central Europe present in Andrzej Stasiuk's prose are the creations of melancholic imagination. The subject of the article is a social placement of this imagination: how does it relate to Central European memory? What kind of utopia is on the reverse of this melancholy? What wound does it cover? Stasiuk's melancholy understood as a certain kind of 'Slavonic sorrow' is unquestionably the answer to torments of re-sentiment and 'minor nation's' spasms of memory. But what exactly does it mean in the specific case of Polish south-eastern Borderland? Hence, the authoress is working on the way Stasiuk's concept of Central Europe corresponds with romantic and post-romantic imaginations of ghastly Ukrainian Borderland, how it refers to the history, war and trauma 'written down' in this land and the possibilities to utter them. Empty space becomes here a mark of Easter European 'nowhere' - what are the consequences of such establishment of ontology of this part of the world? Moreover, she is also working on the most astonishing aspects of Stasiuk's prose, namely the fact that his melancholic imagination creates beauty which seems to be completely unquestioned by the readers: how is it possible? Finally, she is considering Stasiuk's relation to the created reality - the relation of the man to the empty, passive and female-stigmatized space. What kind of masculinity is established through such metaphors?
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