Two Polish writers of the young generation, Dorota Masłowska and Witkowski meet up with German students from the Postdam University as part of the Polonischer Salon series. The discussion's title is Polnische (nich)alltägliche Plattenbauliteratur and it is organised in cooperation with the Polish Institute in Berlin
The Students of Postdam University's Polish Language Studies Department are the initiators of the meeting, and also act as moderators of the Friday discussion. The main topic of the talk focuses on the protagonists of contemporary Polish prose. The figures depicted by Masłowska and Witkowski are usually regular young people, who often identify with some kind of a subcultural movement and live in a neighbourhood of post-communist apartment buildings (usually referred to as 'blocks' in Polish), or in a provincial environment. The language they speak is a specific kind of slang and they are perceived as outcasts by the rest of society.
Masłowska and Witkowski have taken up economical, generational and cultural tensions in society and made them the main themes of their work. In particular, they tend to focus on the stereotypes surrounding the dwellers of the 'blocks', or those who are labelled 'fags'. The two young authors add their own characterstic voices and point of view to the literary and cultural debate surroung sexual and social minorities in today's Poland.
Details of the Berlin meeting:
20th of April, 2012, 7 pm
Polish-German Buchbund bookstore
Sanderstr. 8, 12047 Berlin
The talk is moderated by Ewelina Mościńska, and it is conducted in Polish and German with a consecutive translation.
Dorota Masłowska is a novelist and playwright, born in 1983 in Wejherowo. The young writer's career began with the publication of several poems while she was still a student at Gdańsk University. Masłowska is the author of the Polityka Passport Prize-winning book Snow White and Russian Red (2002), a controversial novel that has been translated into several languages including English. Her earlier works include The Queen's Peacock (2005), winner of Poland's highest literary award, the Nike Prize for best book. Two of her stage plays A Couple of Poor Polish-Speaking Romanians (2006) and No Matter How Hard We Tried (2009) were commissioned the top-tier Polish theatre company TR Warszawa and performed in Poland, London, Berlin, Prague, Moscow, Chicago, and Stockholm.
A Couple of Poor Polish-Speaking Romanians has met with a notable interest and it has been staged by foreign directors. The play was staged by New York's Abrons Art Center in 2011, and it recently enjoyed its Slovakian premiere on the 27th of January, 2012. The text has been translated by Bohdana Sprušanská, and the play was directed by the Slovakian Daniel Majling. New showings of the production are presented at the Teatr Divadlo of Andrei Bagar in the Slovakian town of Nitr on the 23rd and 24th of April, and on the 3rd of May, 2012. The performance's cast includes: Kristína Turjanová, Jakub Rybárik, Peter Oszlík, Alena Pajtinková, Renáta Ryníková and Juraj Hrčka.
A Couple of Poor Polish-Speaking Romanians is a grotesque travelogue, in which foul-mouthed Blighty (a TV soap opera actor) and glue-sniffing Gina (a pregnant single mother) pretend to be poor Romanians as they bully their way across the Polish countryside. They hijack a taxi, take a joy ride with a drunken middle-aged woman and finally take shelter at the home of a crazy hermit. As Masłowska herself stated,
It is a short play, filled with humor and a whole lot of gags. Two really nice protagonists, acting on mysterious impulses, set off on an unintentionally frantic quest through Poland. It is a quest full of comic adventures, which over time turn out to be no joke, quite the opposite in fact, utterly no joke, indeed, quite tragic. The audience has to consider the fact that the play is not as lighthearted as it seems; its characters do not represent positive social or psychological models, and this journey doesn't have to be a life quest at all. Quite the contrary.
Born in 1975 , Witkowski is a writer and journalist, but early on his career he was also a literary critic, noted for being a co-editor (with Piotr Marecki and Igor Stokfiszewski) of Tekstylia (2002), the first major synthetic approach to the literature of the 1970s generation, encompassing an anthology of works, a dictionary and a collection of excerpts from reviews.
Having graduated from Jagiellonian University with an MA in Polish Studies, Witkowski stayed there to work for a PhD and taught a course at the Department of Journalism, but then gave up the scholarly career for writing. He made his literary debut in 2001 with a collection of short stories entitled Copyright. He also published Lubiewo (2005), another collection of short stories Fototapeta (2006), Barbara Radziwiłłówna z Jaworzna-Szczakowej (2008), Margot (2009) and Drwal (2011), his first criminal story. In 2007 he was presented with the prestigiuos Passport Award of the Polityka weekly, and he is also the laureate of the 2006 Gdynia Literary Prize for his Lubiewo.
His texts have been translated into numerous languages. German translations of his works include the titles Lubiewo, which was released in German in 2007 and Barbara Radziwiłłówna z Jaworzna-Szczakowej, published in 2010 under the title Queen Barbara.
Source: berlin.polnischekultur.de, e-teatr.pl