Słowo o Moskwie (i pewnej metaforze)

• Authors: Zbigniew Kopeć

Title variants

EN

A Word about Moscow (and about One Metaphor)

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

At the beginning of the 1930s the USSR wished to convince everybody that a “new wonderful world” had been created in the east of Europe. Stalin was not only after the hearts and minds of proletarians and artists but also after trade with the capitalist world. Wood, which was harvested by the prisoners of the gulags, was an important Russian export commodity. Thus many people from all over the world – Trotsky’s poputchiks or, as Lenin put it more bluntly, “useful idiots” – were invited to come to the USSR for propaganda reasons. Russian propaganda officers wanted the visitors to write and speak well about the USSR after they returned back to their home countries. Th e metaphor which most frequently appears in the reports on the visits to the USSR is that of “water”. Visitors perceive themselves as persons closed in a bathyscaphe submerged in some liquid or fluid and the inhabitants of Moscow are depicted as a fl owing and flooding liquid/fluid. According to Zygmunt Bauman, a liquid/fluid can contaminate/infect/ cause death whereas, according to Mircea Eliade, a fluid is a “community” of all potential, the cradle of life. Th e tension between these two possible readings of this aquatic metaphor can be clearly seen in the reports on the visits to the USSR. The reports on the visits to Moscow, which were published in Western Europe and in Poland at the beginning of the 1930s, bear the mark of the times in which they were written. Their authors – Bernard Shaw, Andre Gide, Antoni Słonimski, Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz – had very different attitudes towards the USSR. Some of them believed in the “new wonderful world”, others depicted it more critically. However, all of them had the opportunity of learning that the world which they saw was fabricated.

Keywords

EN

Comparative literature; The image of USSR; The metaphor of “water”; The literature of Western Europe and Poland in the 1930s

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego
• Journal: Rocznik Komparatystyczny
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 2
• Pages: p. 111-124

Contributors

author

Zbigniew Kopeć

• Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza, Instytut Filologii Polskiej, Zakład Poetyki i Krytyki Literackiej, ul. Fredry, 61-701 Poznań