Where the Heart Is: Polish Authors’ Thoughts on Home

fragment_muru_z_chlopcem_mnw_.jpg, default, 'Wall Fragment and a Boy' by Władysław Ślewiński, circa 1909, photo: National Museum in Warsaw, Where the Heart Is: Polish Authors’ Thoughts on Home

#lifestyle & opinion

Whether away or, indeed, at home, make yourselves comfortable – and let’s have a look at what various Polish authors have to say about the concept of home.

Plenty of us have spent the majority of the past year at home. The beginning of 2021 doesn’t seem particularly promising with regard to going back to normal either – most of us still spend long hours on Zoom calls, online classes, or communicating with the outside world mostly via email. The Internet abounds with pieces of advice on how to spend our time under lockdown, as if everyone has suddenly started to brainstorm different sources of entertainment that don’t require leaving one’s house. Some sort of collective confusion seems to have occurred once we, as a society, realised that we’re spared the next day’s long commute or lengthy Friday night outings with friends or co-workers – and that the space which mostly served us as a place where we sleep and keep our stuff must become our daily dwelling.

Text

[…] each of us has two homes – one actual home with a fixed location in time and space, and a second that is infinite, with no address and no chance of being immortalized in architectural plans […].

Author

From ‘House of Day, House of Night’ by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

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'A.B.C. – The First Reading Lesson' by Franciszek Ejsmond, 1886-1893, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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For those of us who feel a constant urge to traverse the world, who feel at home in random new places and always carry a sense of home with them, the current situation is likely tough. The pandemic deprived us of our daily sense of safety and comfort, forcing us to get used to the new normal. Familiar places ceased to be familiar once they became necessarily empty, or when visiting them became a serious health hazard. Those whose lives were normally dispersed around the globe or a given country were forced to start feeling at home… at home, in their own, physical, perhaps painfully static places of dwelling.

Of course, one needn’t be a compulsive traveller to simply miss places. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that our interactions with spaces we know well are pervaded with sentimental affection – we just don’t always realise that they’re intrinsic parts of our experience of reality.

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'Houses in Pełcznica' by Adolf Dressler, 1850-1881, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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Olga Tokarczuk’s words, quoted above, show that for those with complicated relations to their land and difficult factors determining where their home can realistically be, the idea of attachment to places can be much more pronounced. The Noble Prize winner’s novel House of Day, House of Night concerns a village community in the west of Poland, close to the Czech border, which includes people who moved from the east of the country once the lands were claimed by the Soviets. The village, in turn, was previously inhabited by Germans, who left after World War II – leaving behind their belongings that are frequently discovered by the new dwellers; they sometimes return, wishing to see the land once again.

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A human home is fused with the human being. It’s his or her living part.

Author

Teresa Ferenc, trans. AP

Despairing about the limited possibilities of going out or travelling, we sometimes forget that our homes partly make us who we are – or is it us who turn our houses into homes? Perhaps it’s both, and sometimes it’s the latter that’s necessary. The author of the above quote, Teresa Ferenc, a poet and teacher, experienced the pain of moving around and being deprived of a stable home for the first time at the age of nine – when she was forced to see her parents being killed by the Nazis in the Sochy massacre. After that, she kept moving from one children’s home to another. Her first volume of poetry, Moje Ryżowe Poletko (My Paddy Field), was released in 1964. Her work touches upon the topics of love and motherhood, as well as on the tragedy she had to witness as a child.

Perhaps being refused the sense of safety provided by a home makes one realise exactly what the poet says – that our homes constitute intrinsic parts of us. Those of us who weren’t forced to find this out due to displacement or any other sort of personal or collective tragedy may still make good use of Ferenc’s words – and they may prove particularly useful now, when the word ‘home’ frequently appears followed by ‘office’.

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'Leda and the Swan' by Jerzy Hulewicz, 1928, photo: Krzysztof Wilczyński / National Museum in Warsaw

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Home is a place where our souls strip naked. Home is a place where we can take off our masks and let home stroke our cheek. Home lulls us to sleep. Home doesn’t judge, doesn’t settle accounts; home loves selflessly and unconditionally. Only home loves like this. Provided that it’s a real home.

Author

From ‘Klinika Kukieł’ (Marionette Clinic) by Agnieszka Kacprzyk, trans. AP

Here, Agnieszka Kacprzyk provides a direct and touching commentary on how a safe home is truly a thing to cherish. Paradoxically, remote work and other instances of our home life being conflated with our work or university life may have caused us to appreciate our homes a little bit less – after all, they have turned from cosy spaces where we return every evening, exhausted and relieved, into four walls that contain our entire lives. Throughout the past year, plenty of us have probably found ourselves wishing, at least for a moment, that we could be on a plane to Italy or on our way to a pub, or perhaps just anywhere else. The feeling of letdown caused by the pandemic preventing us from living our lives to the fullest is, of course, quite understandable.

However, there’s the other side of the same coin – the fact that our homes constitute our sanctuaries in these stressful times. Perhaps perceiving them as such – rather than merely as places where we just shower, sleep and keep our stuff – may ease our lockdown frustration slightly. The context of Agnieszka Kacprzyk’s quote above, the novel Klinika Kukieł, concerns six friends, all university students, who decide to escape the hustle of the city and wander the Carpathian Mountains. Unlike other stories depicting the process of gaining valuable self-knowledge while in communion with nature, this one presents a grim vision of the human self when unfiltered by civilisation or society, as the dark sides of the characters’ personalities finally get the best of them. This is certainly not to say that wandering into the unknown isn’t a good idea – just that, as the situation forces us to stay mostly within the safe and the known, we may as well make the most of it.

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Tadeusz Kantor with his work at home in Nidzica, photo: Tadeusz Rolke / AG

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My creation was – and still is – my home. A painting, a play, theatre, the stage.

Author

Tadeusz Kantor, trans. AP

These words were written by Tadeusz Kantor when he was slowly approaching the end of his life. The author of the quote was a recognised director, playwright, painter, scenographer and art theorist as well as a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków. His theatrical activity began under the Nazi occupation, when he established an experimental theatre that brought together the artistic community. After the war, he established Cricot 2, a theatre whose tradition alluded to the pre-war avant-garde Cricot theatre. The words above come from the script of his performance Today Is My Birthday – first performed in 1991, after the artist’s death, based on his personal memories of war, family and friends, and containing strong allusions to his own work as a painter. Kantor viewed his art as something deeply personal and an inextricable part of his identity and, as the quote seems to confirm, felt fully at home when creating. Today Is My Birthday stopped being performed in 1992, and some critics believed that the author’s absence caused the work to be inevitably lacking.

Text

A man is in a much better situation when sitting in a wooden shanty where everyone is laughing than when stuck in a three-story villa where everyone is crying.

Author

From ‘Láska Nebeská’ (Unearthly Love) by Mariusz Szczygieł, trans. AP

Mariusz Szczygieł, a celebrated author and reporter fascinated with everything Czech, as well as a recipient of the prestigious Nike Literary Award, provides an optimistic, joyful take on houses and homes. It’s a joyful community that makes a home, not luxury or excess. This popular sentiment has become even more prominent recently, when on top of our personal issues and sorrows there’s the widespread stress and tension caused by the pandemic – often further reinforced by social interactions being somewhat limited. Láska Nebeská (‘Heavenly Love’ or, as the author considers more suitable: ‘Unearthly Love’) is a collection of opinion pieces concerning Czech literature and important Czech figures.

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'The Florists' by Olga Boznańska, 1889, photo: National Museum in Krakow

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Alluding to the Czech language, which often sounds funny to Poles, Szczygieł claims that ‘Czech people were created to make Polish people laugh’. Awaiting less anxiety-inducing times, we may want to derive as much pleasure as possible from company, not only that of people, but also that of other dwellers of our homes – books, the gateway to different people, lives and realities.

Text

And hie you to the palaces / Of man, to bloat your pride; / Though mine is formed by clumsy bone / And is not handsome—'tis my own.

Author

From ‘The Tortoise and the Mouse’ by Ignacy Krasicki, trans. Paul Soboleski

Ignacy Krasicki, a writer, Catholic bishop, and chaplain of Stanisław August Poniatowski, was one of the key literary figures of the Polish Enlightenment. Having launched his writing career in 1775, he was amongst the cultural and artistic elite who would meet regularly at Thursday Dinners organised by the King. His most famous works include the mock-heroic poem Monachomachia (War of the Monks), the novel Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego Przypadki (The Adventures of Nicholas Experience) and the source of the quotation above – Fables and Parables.

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Scene from 'The Morality of Mrs. Dulska', Nowy Theatre in Warsaw, 1950, photo: Edward Hartwig / www.audiovis.nac.gov.pl (NAC)

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Krasicki’s fables involve mostly animal characters and are quite moralistic in nature. The one quoted above, titled The Tortoise and the Mouse, concerns a mouse expressing her pity towards a tortoise who inhabits a small, cramped shell. The tortoise, in turn, replies that, although his little portable house may not be fancy, it’s his own – and therefore good enough. Although the text contains a somewhat predictable and quite obvious moral, it’s also a refreshing celebration of modesty and simplicity.

Text

Think about it: we’ll have our own home. You’ll feel unhappy, people will mock you and betray you; then, you’ll come back to our home and say: ‘This is our home’. The world will seem completely different to you if you look at it through a window of our home.

Author

From ‘Pierwszy Krok w Chmurach’ (First Step in the Clouds) by Marek Hłasko, trans. AP

Yet another reflection on comfort and safety provided by a home, Hłasko’s words come from a short story titled ‘First Step in the Clouds’, published in a collection of the same title, released in 1956. Although the sample above is undeniably touching, the story itself concerns three men who, having mocked and harassed a pair of lovers out of boredom, realise their own inner emptiness and bitterness caused by unhappiness and a lack of beauty in their own lives.

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'Old House' by Ferdynand Ruszczyc, 1903, photo: National Museum in Warsaw

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The text constitutes a commentary on the general moral and psychological malaise that pervaded post-war Polish society, and the whole collection departs from the optimistic mode of writing that characterised socialist realism, instead depicting the reality as bleak and hopeless, focussing on the issues of individuals rather than on the society as a collective. Amongst all that, there’s the quote above, mentioning the bliss of being at home, the significance of having a space of one’s own, where everyday struggles and all that’s wrong with the world immediately seems different – perhaps even slightly less horrible.

Text

Everywhere’s good, but home is best.

Author

Polish proverb, trans. AP

Finally, last but not least, an absolute classic – the Polish version of ‘There’s no place like home’ or ‘East of West, home is best’ and one of the most common Polish proverbs. Naturally, plenty of us are probably inclined to disagree with it, considering the joys of exploring new places enabled by relatively cheap and largely accessible international travel. Moreover, while being at home might be the best option for health reasons, it’s not always an ideal one as far as our overall well-being is concerned, especially for those of us who, snowed under with remote work and other activities, find ourselves rarely leaving the house.

‘Home’, however, can be understood rather broadly, and extending the concept to include the local area, region, or even the entire country might encourage each of us to release stress in these trying times by discovering what our homeland(s) have to offer. In the case of Poland, a potential weekend trip may include one of Poland’s UNESCO heritage sites fabulous Polish forest or one of Poland’s previous capitals. And those of us completely stuck at home, as well as those who would like to admire a bit of Poland from afar, may appreciate the unconventional local Instagram guides to Poland or enjoy the wisdom of other Polish proverbs.

Written by Anna Potoczny, Mar 2021

_{Sources: https://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/tadeusz-kantor-dzis-sa-moje-urodziny, https://culture.pl/pl/tworca/tadeusz-kantor, https://niezlasztuka.net/o-sztuce/tadeusz-kantor-geniusz-pamieci, https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierwszy_krok_w_chmurach, https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierwszy_krok_w_chmurach_(opowiadanie), https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/20/fiction.features2, https://culture.pl/en/artist/ignacy-krasicki, https://culture.pl/pl/dzielo/mariusz-szczygiel-laska-nebeska, https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_Ferenc, ‘House of Day, House of Night’ by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003).}

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