Dorota Masłowska’s Provinces- A lecture by Katarzyna Czeczot, Ph.D.

See the recording of the webinar "Dorota Masłowska’s Provinces" with Katarzyna Czeczot, Ph.D. held on May 26, 2021.

The second edition of Dorota Masłowska's debut novel Snow White and Russian Red (Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną) comes up with the cover of Maciej Sieńczyk, cartoonist, illustrator, comic book creator. His drawing transforms two images crucial for Polish visual culture. The first one would be a nineteenth-century allegory of Poland as a woman trampled by a horse on which a Cossack with a saber sits. The second one depicts a Polish nurse providing care for an insurgent, probably during the Warsaw Uprising (1944). Both scenes outlined by Sieńczyk, referring to Polish martyrdom iconography, reveal the paradoxes of relations between Poland and Russia, relations to which the title of Masłowska's novel also refers. Snow White and Russian Red's language is the product of a post-dependent imagination, shaped by the history of Poland as a Russian province in the 19th century and as a satellite country of the USSR in the 20th century. The author of this novel excellently manages to recreate the cultural game of inferiority and superiority, inseparable from empire and provinces' geography.

Katarzyna Czeczot is a literature historian, feminist, associate professor at the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. She is interested in literature and visual culture from the French Revolution to the present times. She is the co-author of the exhibition The Polish Woman. Medium, Shadow, Image at the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, 2005. She is the co-editor of Encyklopedia gender (2014) and the author of Ophelism: Romantic appropriations, feminist interventions (2016, in Polish). In the series "New Romantic Library" she published three anthologies (in Polish): Magnetism, Psychiatric practices, and (with Michał Pospiszył) Romantic Anti-capitalism. She wrote reviews and essays published, among others, in "n.paradoxa", "Teksty Drugie", "Praktyka Teoretyczna", "Widok", "Notatnik Teatralny", "Czas Kultury", "Dwutygodnik", and "Glissando." She is a member of the editorial staff of "Praktyka Teoretyczna" and "Wiek XIX."



The lecture is presented in cooperation with the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and is part of the Tadeusz Solowij Lectures of the Kosciuszko Foundation.