L’Arbre de Cracovie: Le mythe polonais dans la litterature francaise (review)

Rosset, François. L’Arbre de Cracovie: Le mythe polonais dans la littérature française. Paris: Imago, 1996. Pp. 268. ISBN 2-911416-00-7. 140 F.

Early in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1993 feature film Trois Couleurs: Blanc, the protagonist Karol Karol returns from France to his native Warsaw by hiding in a friend’s suitcase. Barely escaping a gang of airport security thugs, Karol staggers to his brother’s hair salon, which has undergone some changes since his departure. “You’ve got neon,” he says. “This is Europe now,” replies his brother.

The sequence cleverly satirizes Poland’s transition from Communism to neo-capitalism, but it also responds to stereotypes of Poland that predate the Communist era. Centuries before Winston Churchill warned of an iron curtain descending upon Central Europe, writers and travelers from Western Europe felt they were entering an unfamiliar and exotic landscape when they crossed the eastern frontiers of Prussia or Austria for Poland, Hungary or Russia. In L’Arbre de Cracovie, François Rosset examines representations of Poland in French literature and culture from 1573, the year Henri de Valois became King of Poland, to 1896, when Alfred Jarry published Ubu roi. Between the rise and fall of these two kings, one historical, the other fictional, Rosset presents an impressive body of research that includes familiar figures like Voltaire, Constant and de Staël as well as lesser known writers and texts.