Topographical Turn in Contemporary Polish Literature in the Works by Erwin Kruk, Andrzej Stasiuk and Jerzy Limon

The analysis concerns the experience of geographical space as a text which allows a reading of the time and experience of a particular place, and in which traces of the past initiate the work of memory. Interpreting works on space and place demands we bring in the interdisciplinary contexts of humanistic geography and geo-history and employ the tools of geo-poetics. I present the oeuvre of three writers. Erwin Kruk narrates the post-war identity drama in the Masuria and the traces of its belonging to Germany. Kruk contemplates individual memory confronted with geographical space seen as historical text. Andrzej Stasiuk's descriptions of traveling in Eastern Europe as newly divided by borders belong to the poetics of postcolonialism. Jerzy Limon presents the space of the city of Sopot as a palimpsest, read by the narrator as a historian-archeologist.