An Adventure for All Ages: History, Post-Memory, and Romance in Tomasz Różycki's Twelve Stations

Abstract

The article examines Tomasz Różycki’s 2004 mock epic Twelve Stations. The poem recounts an oneiric tale about a community of expatriates from Poland’s Eastern Borderlands who send their grandson on a mission to assemble a scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today’s Ukraine. Revolving around the issues of memory, post-memory, and nostalgia, Twelve Stations draws heavily from the adventure tradition to present a fresh perspective on modern Poland’s founding myths: the loss of Borderlands and settling the post-German territories in the West. Reading the poem in the context of cultural memory studies and focusing on the author’s deployment of adventure tropes and patterns, the article argues that Różycki’s poetic tale de-politicizes the existing narratives affixed to forced resettlements by weaving them with various strands of popular romance. In doing so, the poem imagines a collective act of “working through” the trans-generational trauma resulting from physical and cultural uprooting. Różycki’s inventive use of the form demonstrates that adventure narratives can be effective vessels of cultural memory, capable of repurposing elements of official narratives and nostalgic imagination to initiate more constructive and future-oriented identity-building processes.

At the end of WWII, Poland's most significant population transfer also brought a major shift in the nation's adventure imaginary. In 1944–47, following the Tehran and Yalta agreements, close to two million ethnic Poles from the eastern borderlands (parts of today's Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine) were forcefully relocated to the country's newly acquired, post-German territories.¹ Eager to distract the nation from losing its historic lands, communist propaganda presented the resettlement process as an act of collective heroism. The official discourse transformed eastern expatriates into frontiersmen, guardians of Polish heritage, and self-sacrificing builders of the socialist future, giving birth to the “Polish Wild West” myth.² Like in classical Westerns, this founding narrative of postwar Poland spoke of everyday hardships, dangers, and conflicts but also emphasized people's hopes and a sense of national mission associated with rebuilding (though, unlike American Westerns, it left out the violence, chaos, and lawlessness haunting the post-war landscape). Thus, from Eugeniusz Paukszta's inaugural Trud Ziemi Nowej (The Toil of the New Land, 1948) to works by Józef Hen, Henryk Panas, Wojciech Żukrowski, Halina Auderska, and others, the founding myth of modern Poland evolved along the adventure trajectory.³

After the communist regime collapsed in 1989, a democratic forum finally allowed the expatriate community to freely remember, commemorate, and culturally express their collective experience. However, as the “Polish Wild West” narrative fell victim to the de-communization of Polish historiography, the flood of memories that dominated Polish cultural production and public discourse quickly coalesced around the broader narrative of Polish martyrdom. The public image of expatriates shifted to that of victims of ethnic cleansing: uprooted, transported in degrading conditions to unfamiliar spaces where they had to organize their lives anew, having to deal with the postwar chaos, privations, and violence, and deprived of rights to voice their suffering.⁴ In literature, this manifested in records of individual and collective traumas on the one hand and works imbued with nostalgia, melancholia, and “retrotopic” mythologization of the lost homelands (małe ojczyzny) on the other.⁵ Thus, a paradoxical reversal took place: the expatriate communities’ regaining of narrative agency (freedom of expression) coincided with a sense of loss of historical agency as their stories became part of the larger narrative of collective victimhood.⁶

The adventurous aura surrounding Poland's “Wild West” survived the above shift in memory culture by finding new forms of expression. As Przemysław Czapliński notes, after 1989, Polish authors, members of the second and third post-war generations, started to recognize their regions as palimpsests of repressed histories. To uncover them, they transformed “their narrators into obsessive explorers of the past and situate[d] them on the margins of the present.”⁷ Although the above assessment holds for many postmemorial authors, many of whom focus on the Holocaust and Poland's Jewish past, it is particularly on the mark in regards to works by the third-generation descendants of eastern expatriates: a body of prose that Inga Iwasiów has termed “neo-post-settlement literature.”⁸ In these works, family histories, oral traditions, souvenirs, and spaces create a historical “elsewhere” where capitalist Poland's dull and orderly reality loses its contours, and the protagonists go on spiritual quests of self-discovery across historical and geographical borders.⁹

In this article, I focus on a text that, through its novel deployment of adventure tropes, can be considered precursory for a new type of post-modern, post-memorial Polish prose that exploded in the late 2000s, particularly in Holocaust narrations.¹⁰ Tomasz Różycki's 2004 mock-epic poem Twelve Stations tells the story of an aging community of eastern expatriates living in a post-German Opole, loosely modeled after Różycki's relatives, who send their grandson on a mission to assemble the scattered family and guide it to their lost homeland in today's Ukraine. The tradition of adventure writing, which I approach through the generic category of romance, allows Różycki to grant the Silesian expatriate community a symbolic agency lost in pre- and post-1989 narratives, acknowledging both their repressed victimhood and instrumentalized heroism.

Twelve Stations feeds off the adventurous energies of the “Polish Wild West” mythology. However, instead of simply recuperating or subverting the heroic narrative animating communist-era propaganda, Różycki de-politicizes it by weaving it with other strands of popular romance, old and new, to set the stage for a collective act of “working through” the trans-generational trauma of forced resettlements.¹¹ In doing so, the author introduces a potent strategy of engaging with the country's troubled past and provides an emphatically affirmative answer as to whether popular fiction—in this case, the adventure romance—can serve as a vessel for cultural memory.

Twelve Stations: A Cross-Generational Adventure

During his twenty-year-long literary career, Różycki rose to prominence as a major voice in contemporary Polish poetry. This distinguished position owes largely, though not exclusively, to Twelve Stations, which both readers and critics welcomed with great enthusiasm. The volume turned a promising “local” author into a well-known mainstream poet.¹² It won him the prestigious Kościelski Award, paving the way for numerous other distinctions, inspired several adaptations for theatre and radio, and even found its way onto high school reading lists, effectively making Różycki a contemporary classic.¹³ Clearly, this oneiric tale about a community of expatriates who undertake a final journey to their lost fatherland stroke a cord with audiences, offering a new perspective on one of the country's founding myths. Bill Johnston's award-winning translation of Twelve Stations and volumes of poetry translated by Mira Rosenthal further consolidated Różycki's status and brought him recognition in the Anglo-American world.

As befits an adventure romance, the digressive narrative of Twelve Stations revolves around a fantastical quest. At the outset of the story, a not-so-young protagonist—referred to only as the Hero and Grandson—returns to his family home in Opole: an apartment building inhabited by a community of expatriates from the former eastern Borderlands. Shortly after, the eighty-year-old family matriarchs, Grandma and Aunt Sydonia, dispatch him

on a mission / to gather the Family that fate and adversity had scattered all over the world, / around Poland and all the Polish provinces, to unite them in common cause / and undertake an expedition to Gliniany and Zadwórze, original home of Babcia /and Auntie, / so as to rescue the Parish and the church, take part in the May Day service / and—last but not least— spend some time with Babcia.¹⁴

The pretext for this mission is relatively trivial. The two elderly women receive a visit from a traveling priest who collects money to restore the old parish church. This innocuous request flares up Aunt Sydonia's imagination as she recalls how, shortly before their exile, the parishioners buried the church bells, the monstrance, vestments, and other valuable objects to save them from theft and destruction. The idea of bringing the family together, returning the childhood home to recover the hidden treasures, and restoring the church to its former glory quickly balloons to cosmic proportions:

For Auntie intended / to invite the presidents of both Poland and Ukraine to the church celebration, / so that they might see an act of reconciliation and—like symbols / of two fraternal lands that were yet so severely at odds with one another, / having been split asunder by third parties and the whisperings of devils / from Muscovy and elsewhere–/ might come back to one another and unite again. / This ceremony would be a kind of mystic wedding, / a marriage party of nations, fulfillment of the prophecies of Saint Kinga, / Cleopatra, and ancient Wernyhora, who might once again deign / to appear in this company and hand to some chosen one / a Golden Horn or Magical Flute, with the aid of which / lost nations would return to the fold, and the spirit of enterprise / and regional autonomy would spread its wings. And what if this event / were to coincide with the Pope's planned visit to Ukraine / right around spring—if this were to come off there / would surely be a miracle / of unity and a total revival of the world.¹⁵

The ironic tone of the passage does not obscure the grandiose stakes behind the quest, as viewed through the eyes of the first-generation expatriates, deeply influenced by Poland's romantic and religious traditions.¹⁶ Their over-productive imagination transforms what may seem like a minor communal initiative into a historic reconciliation between nations and a metaphysical quest to restore the cosmic order disrupted by the war.

What follows the family council is a series of mock-adventure episodes in which the Grandson first assembles various “magical” items, such as the family gorget that will “guide and protect [him] during his ever so perilous expedition,” and then members of his eccentric family scattered throughout Opole and surrounding towns and villages. After all the joyful reunions, drinking, feasting, debating, and in-fighting, the family is rallied up and assembled, though it is mostly the elders who respond to the call. Under the guidance of the Grandson, increasingly intoxicated, they board the train that takes them back to their lost homeland. As they traverse the labyrinthine railway networks and approach the Ukrainian border, more family members join them, both living and dead. They begin exchanging traumatic narratives and rejoicing at the reunion, which infuses the journey with carnivalesque energy. Meanwhile, their Silesian settlement—the apartment building—falls victim to the forces of modernity: as communal gardens make way for a new parking plot construction site, the commotion pushes ants and local drunkards to invade the apartment building and take it apart. The return journey remains open-ended: as the ghost train enters western Ukraine, its passengers depart uncertain of what the future will bring them.

One reason for the resounding success is that Różycki's poem successfully marries seemingly irreconcilable elements: it is both ironic and nostalgic, private and universal, celebratory and satirical, serious and humorous, complex and accessible, lofty and bawdy, mythopoetic and iconoclast. Such an impressive range finds reflection in the rich intertextual tapestry Różycki weaves in his poem. “[In] terms of genre,” writes Bill Johnston in the preface to his translation, “Twelve Stations manages to be all things to all people.”¹⁷ He lists among Różycki's generic influences classical epics, gawęda (narrative imitating oral storytelling), mock epics, and romantic poetry, especially Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz (1835). Also, as the poet himself had admitted, he began writing his work as a novel rather than a poem, which expands the text's generic pedigree even further.¹⁸ In recent years, literary scholars have successfully explored the interpretive possibilities the above genres offer to the reading of Twelve Stations, mapping out the intertextual web the author spins in his narrative. Still, Różycki's work remains surprisingly under-researched.¹⁹ On his expansive list, Johnston also includes romance: a genre that has hitherto received little critical attention, both in the context of Różycki's poetry and Polish scholarly tradition in general.²⁰ Let me now define this concept and establish its relationship to cultural memory.

Adventure Romance and/as Cultural Memory

In the introduction, I proposed that we can productively read Różycki's narrative poem as an adventure romance. But what exactly does such a reading entail? In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northrop Frye characterizes romance as mythos or a narrative archetype concentrated around the figures of idealized heroes and heroines, the quest, and a supernatural conflict between polarly-opposed cosmic forces (“heavenly” and “demonic” worlds).²¹ Thus conceived, romance deploys elements such as exotic settings, fantastic occurrences, adventure, emotional intensity, and various forms of narrative excess to convey stories that offer a more “humanized” form of myth. Frye considers romance “the structural core of all fiction,” pointing to connections and similarities between a vast body of texts ranging from Heliodorus’ Ethiopica to nineteenth-century imperial adventure to present-day fantasy novels and beyond.²² Such wildly broad scope made subsequent scholarly discussions of this mode begin with acknowledging the term's “fuzziness,” opacity, and instability as a generic category. Yet, for all its frustrating vagueness, romance proved itself a remarkably adaptable and persistent set of literary conventions.²³

Following Diane Elam, Barbara Fuchs, Katherine Isobel-Baxter, Jean-Michel Ganteau, and other scholars studying romance in modern literature, I focus on a particular use of the poetics of romance for historically and socially specific aims, rather than generic classifications.²⁴ In other words, I consider romance “a concatenation of both narratological elements and literary topoi, including idealization, the marvelous, narrative delay, wandering, and obscured identity.”²⁵ Viewing romance as a specific literary strategy, argues Barbara Fuchs, allows us “to address the occurrence of romance within texts that are clearly classified as some other genre and incorporating the hybridization and malleability that . . . are such key elements of romance.”²⁶ This approach is indeed the most suited to discuss the romance mode in the context of Polish literature, where romance as a genre never established a firm footing, yet provided essential ingredients of the Polish romantic imagination.²⁷

Thus, romance is a malleable yet easily recognized constellation of tropes and narrative patterns that, as Jameson argues, authors at different historical moments can deploy to symbolically “buffer” turbulent social transitions. In my discussion, I add the qualifier “adventure” to indicate my focus on romance as a quest-driven journey of self-discovery rather than an account of erotic complications (although both often go hand in hand).²⁸ Also, instead of dwelling on questions of ideology, as Jameson and Isobel-Baxter do, I focus on the trans-generational dimension of romance tropes and patterns, namely their capacity to deal with collective trauma and thus to produce what Jan Assmann termed “cultural memory:” a form of knowledge about the past that is “exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that . . . may be transferred from one situation to another and from one generation to another.”²⁹

Can adventure romance serve as a viable medium for a mode of collective remembering thus defined? At first glance, not quite. After all, romance's adventurous plots remove one from—rather than confront them with—socio-historical realities. At the same time, its narrative excess often violates the principles of realism and propriety that modern memory discourses typically call for. No matter how fallible, disrupted, or subject to manipulation, memory—individual or collective—maintains a tangible link between the past and present, thus creating a sense of continuity of experience. By contrast, romances feed on fantasy, imagination, and escapist urges rather than real-life events. Their dream-like, winding stories remove readers from ordinary reality and transport them to unfamiliar spaces that instill wonder, thrill, and horror. The ticket price for this experience is the loss of temporal and existential stability, manifested most often in the theme of amnesia or some other “break in consciousness.”³⁰ However, for all its escapism and disregard for the kind of “traumatic realism” characterizing expressions of collective suffering, romance's relationship to reality and cultural memory is more complex.³¹

First, romance as a form is preoccupied not only with the theme of the past and its lingering influence on the present—manifest in its recurrent themes of spectrality and haunting—but indeed with its own generic continuity. Despite its protean malleability, the structural core of romance remained largely unchanged.³² Riffing off Frye's concept of displacement, Jameson, notes that “in its emergent, strong form a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message” and that its ideology “persists into the later, more complex structure as a generic message which coexists—either as a contradiction or, on the other hand, as a mediatory or harmonizing mechanism—with elements from later stages.”³³ Indeed, although intertextuality is literature's effective memory, few genres rely on it to such an extent as romance. It is worth noting that this “memory of literature” is not only a purely inter-literary phenomenon but also a mechanism of invoking the genre's extra-literary contexts.³⁴ Thus, for example, Różycki's incorporation of this mode in the context of the expatriate community recalls and re-contextualizes the heroic discourse built around settling “Recovered Territories” without the need to reference it directly. At the same time, invoking the broader tradition of adventure writing, from ancient epics to present-day popular fiction, allows the author to gesture towards this tradition's universal and destabilizing aspects, effectively de-politicizing the heroic account of the expatriate experience.

The second point of affinity between romance and cultural memory, particularly of traumatic events, is the mode's embrace of excess and otherness as the defining features of its poetics. Expanding Rosemary Jackson's observation on fantastic literature to all of the romance tradition, we can say that the mode “points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems.”³⁵ Indeed, Northrop Frye was among the first scholars to point out that although romances tend to reflect the ideology of the ruling classes, the excess they produce—be it narrative, affective, or epistemological—has considerable transgressive potential. “[H]owever conservative [the romancer] may be,” Frye states, “something nihilistic and untamable is likely to keep breaking out of his pages.”³⁶ This capacity to “smuggle in” counter-cultural meanings and affects into an otherwise conservative genre is vital in the context of traumatic memories. As Renate Lachmann observes:

“the fantastic mode of writing pursues the project of creating alternative worlds: the supernatural, the marvelous, the adventurous. In addition, it attempts to compensate for what was lost as a result of cultural constraints. That which had been silenced regains its voice, that which was made invisible recaptures its shape and that which was buried is disinterred. The fantastic thus operates as a mnemonic device that makes the forgotten or repressed reappear in the guise of an imagery by which the ‘real’ is connected with the unknown.”³⁷

Thus, romance narratives provide an outlet for what cannot be said, sometimes not even thought of. Not-coincidentally, themes of spectrality, haunting, family secrets, hidden (and revealed) identities, mysterious sites, and others comprise the bulk of the mode's formulaic treasure trove. Herein also lies the therapeutic potential of romance: not only does it organize human experience into meaningful binary categories—“the world we want and the world we don't want,” good and evil, life and death, innocence and experience, the familiar and the unfamiliar—and hence imposes structure on what defied any semantic organization, but it also offers the promise of closure: quests are completed, secrets revealed, conflicts resolved, evil spells removed, adventures brought to an end, and communities healed.³⁸ The narrativizing power of adventure romances thus provides a relatively safe conduit for traumatic affects and an effective tool in mending gaps in collective and cultural memory by symbolic means.

Twelve Stations illustrates the effectiveness of adventure romance for this type of sublimation. In what follows, I isolate three constitutive elements of adventure romance and demonstrate how Różycki's text uses them to intervene in cultural memory discourse about postwar expatriations and resettlements.

The (Inept) Hero

Shortly after Aunt Sydonia reveals the cosmic stakes of the restorative quest, the narrator outlines a profile of the one to carry out this task:

It was a task for a hero in the classical mold: not only was the Family / three hundred strong and dispersed across the entire globe, / it was also necessary to speak with them, which, when one knew / their characters and peculiarities, constituted a trial / worthy of a true latter-day Jason, Hercules, Asterix, and MacGuyver.³⁹

For someone repeatedly referred to as “the Hero” [Bohater], Grandson strikes one as a rather disappointing figure: passive, underdeveloped, and decidedly non-heroic. Even the story's narrator cannot refrain from irony when discussing Grandson's potential for action. The latter “is sometimes capable of heroic deeds, is occasionally able to be manful,” meaning that he manages to get up at 10 am to go for breakfast at his Grandmother's. Indeed, ever since he saw figures of performing athletes in an old German anatomical volume, “our modest Hero . . . developed an anxiety toward overly boisterous forms of physical exercise that demanded at the very least a godlike figure and inhuman courage, according to the book, in light of which he opted instead for an intellectual career.”⁴⁰ He is thus an intellectual rather than “man of action.” Throughout the story, we are constantly reminded about the character's vacuity. He does not have a place in life and lacks initiative and self-assurance. Even the seemingly momentous decision to carry out Grandma and Aunt's assignment results from social pressure: one of many instances in which he allows himself to be steered by people and situations. In short, he is a far cry from a “latter-day Jason, Hercules, Asterix, and MacGuyver.”

Scholars and critics have found in this mocking portrayal of the protagonist proof that in Różycki's world, everything and everyone is subject to irony and entropy.⁴¹ However, such characterization is not unusual in romance narratives. As Bruzelius notes, the “central paradox of the adventure plot is that while it is dedicated to the success of the young man who is its hero, the hero remains by far the least interesting character in his story.”⁴² Indeed, the modern adventurer's blankness may be considered a necessary structural feature that mediates the real conflict of romance narratives, which is that between two social forces: modernity and tradition, civilization and barbarity, enchantment and disenchantment, the natural world and the human world, and so on.⁴³ As the above list suggests, the world of romance is highly polarized, though its heroes often remain oblivious to its binary architecture. To quote Jameson, they “show a naivete and bewilderment that marks them rather as mortal spectators surprised by supernatural conflict, into which they are unwittingly drawn, reaping the rewards of cosmic victory without ever having quite been aware of what was at stake in the first place.”⁴⁴

The author of The Political Unconscious describes the hero of romance as “a registering apparatus” rather than a willful actor of the events that unfold around him. The phrase aptly characterizes Grandson, who does not have a strong sense of identity outside of family structures and hierarchies. The little we learn about his past suggests a surprisingly colorful biography, though the family-centered plot has no room for it. Upon encountering his distant relatives in the village of Moszczanka in later parts of the text, the protagonist offers them “a brief account of his studies and travels in foreign lands, along with an extensive narrative concerning his adventures, his illegal jobs, stamps in his passport, lost money, police, escapes, and finally extradition.” Yet, for all the “admiration, pity, and terror” the tale inspired among listeners, it serves only to introduce the main reasons of his visit: the family reunion, the journey, and the restoration of the church. Grandson's personal narrative remains in the shadow of the family quest: a token exchanged for his relatives’ attention, offered only to sway them to the cause. Combined with his irresoluteness and lack of volition, this over-identification with the family narrative makes him a model representative of what Marianne Hirsch calls “the generation of post-memory”: children and grandchildren of trauma survivors whose lives have been profoundly shaped by their elders’ experience.⁴⁵ “To grow up with such overwhelming inherited memories,” notes Hirsch, “to be dominated by narratives that preceded one's birth or one's consciousness, is to risk having one's own stories and experiences displaced, even evacuated, by those of a previous generation. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension.”⁴⁶ The relative weakness of Grandson's personal narrative compared to the family narrative signals a deeply felt, if not consciously realized, connection with his grandparents’ collective trauma: deportations, expatriations, loss of loved ones, and years of enforced silence.

The early scenes of Grandson's homecoming are replete with traces of the family's traumatic past. First, there is the collection of books formerly belonging to “representatives of the Germanic people of the Thousand-Year Reich” that he finds in Grandmother's apartment. As we learn, his childhood imagination viewed them as magical tomes containing secret knowledge about life. While building an aura of magic and mystery, post-German possessions also recall the difficult settlement process in an alien environment and the trauma of forced expulsions (both Polish and German). Second, there is the notable absence of Grandson's parents in Twelve Stations and his strong attachment to Grandmother as a quasi-maternal figure. Of Grandmother's children, the eccentric Uncle seems the only one still alive. In a dream she recalls having the day before sending Grandson off on his mission, she sees her dead husband and “her three little daughters, who also had died many years ago.”⁴⁷ It is unclear if the protagonist's mother is one of them. However, all these enigmas, absences, and geographical displacement paint a picture of a family torn apart by historical events.

Finally, upon entering the garden plots, Grandson recalls childhood games with ants, in which the self-appointed dictator attempts to control the unruly insects. He proclaims enlightened “laws and customs” and draws “a demarcation line on the ground, which by his ukase [russ. ukaz—order] he forbade the ants to cross for any reason whatsoever.”⁴⁸ When the “rebellious ants” continue to ignore and resist his authoritarian laws, however, “Grandson was obliged to take a stick and, with great sadness, put [the ant] to death. . . . Soon, the number of victims guilty of illegal crossings had risen to almost one hundred. . . .”⁴⁹ Throughout the story, ants are frequently linked with the expatriate communities (just like bumblebees are associated with German bombers), making these childhood plays a poignant example of roleplaying the traumatic experiences that shaped family history. At the same time, Grandson's recollections of his childhood offer a micro-model of the therapeutic and compensatory power of adventure:

Thus, / sentence was passed on fascistic bumble bees and Hitlerian honey bees, / and from that moment the garden became a savannah teeming with safari hunters / testing their skill and courage as they prowled on the lookout for bees. . . . . . / With his matchbox, the trapper / had to creep soundlessly, so best of all in Indian costume / or dressed as Janek Kos from Four Tank Troops and a Dog, up to the enemy / positions.⁵⁰

Backyard adventuring—also sentimentally recalled during his visit to the village of Moszczanka—becomes a form of processing the burden of transgenerational trauma. Crucial for this process is the restoration of Grandson's sense of agency. Imagining himself as a hero actively participating in the events that took place before he was born allows him to channel the unspoken complex of emotions by narrativizing them into empowering adventure scenarios.

Following the logic of the childhood exploits, the larger adventure plot in which the author plucks Grandson serves a doubly therapeutic role. In the first place, it facilitates a process of self-discovery. By revisiting the world of his childhood, the protagonist—now an adult—can confront it for the last time before the passage of time destroys all its remaining material and human vessels. In saying farewell to his formative years, he can thus gain a sense of closure and step on the path to maturity. Willfully undertaken or not, his quest thus becomes a belated rite of passage. Furthermore, by assuming the role of “the Hero,” Grandson receives the last chance to become an active participant in the family history that so profoundly shaped his life. In that sense, the point of the quest is not just a symbolic reconstruction of the past—emblematized by reuniting family members and rebuilding the “ancient” church—but also a restoration of Grandson's identity understood as his individual story, a “narrative capital” built on participatory experience in an adventure: creating a sense of self not outside and in opposition to the family world—as he had done thus far—but within it.

Spaces of Memory and Forgetting

To better understand how Grandson's quest facilitates this process of “working through,” let us consider the second crucial element of adventure romance: the construction of space. The chief organizing principle in adventure romance is a system of binary oppositions built around opposing social forces. The hero's ineptitude, liminality, and other psychological shortcomings are thus necessary to make him an effective mediator between these forces. In Twelve Stations, the central conflict involves two fundamental modes of relating to the past: remembrance and forgetting.⁵¹

The realm of memory is anchored in two “sacred” sites. The first one is kamienica, the apartment building occupied by the hero's family, the first-generation expatriates. Kamienica is a bastion of traditionalism, modeled on the mythicized estate of Soplicowo from Adam Mickiewicz's nineteenth-century romantic epic Pan Tadeusz.⁵² It is the center of an ordered cosmos, a realm “governed by its own laws” (7) where humans live with nature and each other in near-perfect harmony:

[h]ere enlightenment and civilization barely glimmered; / here the benighted people still preferred to meet and converse / rather than watch television. Here the center of the family / was its oldest member, holidays were sacred, and sacred were the dinners made by Babcia . . . / Here the fashions of the world were rarely endorsed in full.⁵³

During the uneasy process of postwar settlement, Grandson's family had turned the building into an arc of cultural memory, preserving the remnants of previous occupants and the habits, practices, and rituals they brought with them from their lost home. As a result of their efforts, kamienica has become a self-enclosed, utopian “pocket of stasis within the ferment and rushing forces of social change,” an enchanted oasis in a disenchanted world.⁵⁴

The second sacred space is the parish church in Gliniany, onto which the elderly expatriates project all their nostalgic sentiments and a sense of historical mission. According to Aunt Sydonia, “Gliniany is a famous parish, who knows if the town isn't more ancient than Warsaw itself or even Lwów [L΄viv].”⁵⁵ Destroyed throughout the centuries by armies and marauders of all stripes, the town and its church always managed to rebuild themselves, thus becoming symbols of historical continuity and human perseverance. Furthermore, they are situated within an Arcadian space: “the soil there is the best in all of Europe,” and rivers are filled with “trout and huge crayfish.” The elderly aunt also dreamily recalls that before the war, a Jewish-run local factory made Gliniany into an industrial hub, where “in every cottage they dyed kilims made of sheep's wool . . . then the kilims were sold all over the world.”⁵⁶ As Zuzanna Waś observes in her mythological reading of the poem, nostalgic recollections of the exiled locals transform Gliniany into a figure of a lost paradise: a quasi-mythical space of abundance and prosperity that for centuries had resisted the destructive ebbs and flows of history.

Secreted from the rapidly transforming—and hence unstable—modern world, kamienica in Opole and the parish in Gliniany are both loci of the expatriates’ cultural memory and sites of collective trauma. Their ontologically indeterminate status as an exilic home and nostalgic object, respectively, points to the dramatic break that has split the lives of the expatriate community into “before” and “after.” Although adapted by the eastern settlers to their way of life, kamienica is but a substitute for lost home and thus a constant reminder of the tragic past. As the narrator notes, these darker recollections come to the fore at night, haunting the inhabitants’ collective unconscious under the guise of nightmares: “of terrible War, whose shade still visited the oldest sleepers”; of “Deportation, which bore them far away on a black spectral train”; of “Murder, hammering on the door in the dead of night with rifle butt or ax”; and, finally, of “Expulsion” and “Communism.”⁵⁷

Likewise, returning to Gliniany awakens memories of war-time traumas among the first-generation expatriates.⁵⁸ Hence, the symbolic reconnection of the two sacred spaces that shape the trajectory of the quest aims not only to revisit and possibly reconstruct the past but also to reconcile its traumatic and nostalgic dimensions.

Twelve Stations depicts Gliniany and kamienica as utopian enclaves: anachronistic islands in a dynamically changing contemporary Poland. Although presented in an ironic tone, the latter is suffused with nightmarish, demonic imagery that establishes modernity as an entropic force leaving chaos and destruction in its wake. The human representatives of the modern world include members of the second and third generations of Grandson's family. Seduced by contemporary media, fast foods, consumerism, and other byproducts of capitalist modernity, these younger generations have severed their ties with their forebears’ nostalgic, traditional world. Their geographical imaginary orients itself toward the rich attractions of the western world rather than the nostalgic spaces of eastern borderlands: “We should go to Europe, to the West, the West, not into the mud, into the grime and grimness!”⁵⁹ Non-surprisingly, they dismiss Aunt and Grandmothers’ planned pilgrimage as little more than a senile fantasy, pointing to the transgenerational rift Grandson's mission seeks to heal.⁶⁰

By and large, however, modernity as a force of forgetting finds embodiment in the poem's spatial architecture. Różycki's “geography of modernity” conforms with Paul Connerton's theses on how the contemporary production of space prefigures social amnesia through a dissolution of boundaries (sprawling cityscapes), orienting social life around transit points rather than habitats, and facilitating an increase in speed, which obliterates the more reflective modes of movement (like wandering and walking).⁶¹ This “forgetful” modernity is represented first and foremost by the city of Opole, an “unhappy tumor swelling in the soul,” whose heart beats to the frantic rhythm of transportation hubs.⁶² Różycki's narrator consequently depicts the urban landscape as a post-industrial, neo-Gothic monstrosity: a vaguely threatening, cursed realm filled with polluted waterways (3), “rootless” buildings (115), labyrinthine streets, and dwellings that project a sense of isolation, distrust, and enmity (“chains, bars, barb wire strung across balconies, mad dogs” (7).

Later in the narrative, the complex railway network stretching between Silesia and the Ukrainian border replaces the contemporary metropolis as the symbol of modernity. Rather than a monument to progress, order, and efficiency, railways in Twelve Stations are yet another projection of the labyrinth where hapless travelers lose a sense of time, place, and self:

Thousands of rails, tracks, junctions, tiny dead-end stations and false trails, / merciless points and faulty signal boxes—it all constituted / a single huge labyrinth that kept swallowing passenger trains, / freight trains, expresses. . . / There were times when a train, having entered the Silesian complex, / would drift about in it for years, losing passengers on the way / as they grew old and eventually disembarked in despair /at some random station, or died before they found their way out. / In this manner, at times entire ghost-trains would show up / With a mad driver and nothing but the uniforms of the conductors, / Traveling helplessly around and around for seasons and whole years on end.⁶³

Ever aware of the mythological underpinnings of his story, the narrator compares the mechanical maze engulfing the expatriates’ train to “the innards of an immense beast, the belly of the Leviathan.”⁶⁴ Indeed, as the family leaves their adopted home behind them, the surrounding Upper Silesian landscape transforms into a demonic and post-apocalyptic world in which a formless, dark, and evil substance dissolves people, things, and places, threatening to steal the souls of those on the train.

The recurring themes of erring, confusion, and the loss of self connect these demonic “spaces of modernity” and set them against the expatriates’ sanctuaries. Whereas kamienica and Gliniany are places of memory—understood not just as a relationship with the past but also as a spiritual fabric that unites communities—the modern world is the domain of error and forgetting. It threatens to confuse, distract, and overwhelm at every step, pushing one towards endless wandering. Also, like any labyrinth, this nightmarish vision of modernity contains hidden treasures: people, places, and objects that could be rescued and restored to their proper place in the larger family narrative. This restorative act is the primary goal of Grandon's fantastical quest.

The Quest: In Search of Lost Time

As Frye observes, romance “tends to limit itself to a sequence of minor adventures leading up to a major or climacteric adventure, usually announced from the beginning, the completion of which rounds off the story.”⁶⁵ Likewise, in Twelve Stations, the central quest—the journey to Gliniany—commences only after a sequence of minor adventures that prepare the protagonist for his major undertaking. Although the phantasmagorical train ride that concludes Różycki's story may easily overshadow these early forays, they establish numerous parallels between Grandson's actions and more traditional forms of the adventure story.

The first of these side quests may serve as an example of Różycki's method. “Our Hero” fulfills Grandmother's request to go to a recently sold family plot at a community garden to “save the most valuable things before the new owners took possession, and at least recover the gorget, so it could guide and protect her Grandson during his ever so perilous expedition” (67). The narrator describes the Allotment Gardens as a “never-penetrated labyrinth, fearsome enigma with, enclosed at its very heart, most likely in the Allotment Center itself, a Minotaur or Man-Bull, who lay there waiting for his Theodore.” Following in the footsteps of his mythical antecedent, Grandson ventures into the vegetative labyrinth to recover a “hidden treasure”—the family gorget and his grandfather's railway uniform—and flees from the “Minotaur” who guards them: an elderly neighbor who takes him for a thief and attacks with a hoe. The incongruity between Theseus's quest and Grandson's blundering may be considered another element of Różycki's irony, a not-too-subtle reminder of the decidedly post-heroic age in which the story takes place.

However, rather than undermining his status, such colorful parallels consistently build an adventurous aura around the protagonist. “Adventure's mildly ironic attitude allows a critique of the hero, . . . but also allows the plot which sustains him to continue,” notes Bruzelius, adding that “[t]his inherent flexibility is adventure's greatest strength; it embraces its own critique and seduces us anyway.”⁶⁶ While he may never free himself from the narrator's ironic commentary, Grandson continues to fulfill his narrative role successfully: he assembles various “magical” accessories (such as the gorget, the uniform, or the protective “spell”—Sauternes, Bingen!—found in Mr. Antonov's old tome of recipes), traverses social, geographical, and temporal boundaries, overcomes challenges, and eventually brings the family together onto a train heading towards their former home in western Ukraine. At the same time, he builds his credentials as that specifically modern type of adventurer invented by the nineteenth-century archeological craze and popularized by imperial romance: a collector of artifacts and relics from the past.

The central quest of Twelve Stations involves the train journey across the Polish-Ukrainian border to Gliniany. From the beginning, the family's heroic undertaking carries metaphysical reverberations as a challenge thrown against the irreversible nature of modern time and against death itself. “Is not travel by train a surpassing of death?” rhetorically asks the narrator before establishing a series of parallels between train riding and descending into the world of the dead.⁶⁷ As soon the train carrying the protagonist and his family moves away from Opole, it enters a phantasmagorical realm compared to the belly of Leviathan (and other figurations of hell).⁶⁸ Shortly after, unnatural darkness envelops the train. To his dismay, Grandson perceives the souls of passengers leaving their sleeping bodies. When the train finally crosses the border after a restless night filled with metaphysical dread, departed family members join the living passengers “as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”⁶⁹ With the boundary between life and death disintegrated, joyful reunions ensue. Grandson moves from car to car to meet and feast with his family's living and dead members (possibly including his mother). When the ghostly train finally arrives at the destination, it turns out to be a lone house the protagonist's grandfather shows to Grandmother in a dream she has before the journey. This makes the narrative ambiguous, with the mission's outcome uncertain.

The nightmarish train ride invokes the theme of katabasis, the hero or heroine's descent to the Underworld: one of the oldest tropes within the adventure tradition. Joseph Campbell made it the centerpiece of his “hero's journey” monomyth;⁷⁰ as an element of the death-and-rebirth solstitial cycle (descent). Northrop Frye identified it as the structural foundation of the romance story as such: the triumph of fertile nature over the sterile wasteland.⁷¹ Paul Zweig suggested that it presents the most distilled form of the adventure myth, confirming the adventurer's identity as “an ontological voyager, a traveler between the worlds.”⁷² In Różycki's poem, the traditional meanings associated with the descent journey—recovering forbidden knowledge that allows the hero to restore her identity and the triumph of life over death—are more ambiguous: not only because of the inconclusive ending but also due to the polysemantic nature of the quest itself. For Grandson's family, the journey through the mechanized and estranging railway labyrinth is a return to the lost paradise of their youth, a symbolic “working through” their collective trauma. As such, the journey promises a reconciliation with history and eventual acceptance of fate. At the same time, the phantasmagorical ride also symbolizes the expatriates’ departure from this world, a passage into the afterlife where they finally and truly get to be reunited with their lost loved ones. In that sense, the poem offers a symbolic farewell to a passing generation that experienced some of the worst horrors of twentieth-century history. The wish-fulfillment dream that animates the expatriates’ fantastical quest can only ever be completed in the afterlife (which also explains why the younger generations are reluctant to accompany them on this last journey).

Whether one reads Twelve Stations as a literary confrontation with a collective nostalgic fantasy, a parable of generational passing, or a meditation on the cyclicality of history, its therapeutic potential resides in the same mechanisms that drive Grandson's childhood play. Namely, the phantasmagoric quest allows the community of expatriates to re-enter the stream of history as willful agents rather than victims. The poem juxtaposes their last journey, accompanied by the destruction of their adoptive homes in Upper Silesia, with the dramatic events that lead to their original exodus. Once again, the expatriate community must gather up the most valuable possessions and board a train into the unknown: “[s]ome, retaining the memory of their last journey by train, brought potatoes with them, bed linen, blankets, gold, dollar bills sewn into their skirts and stuffed in their shoes, so as to save themselves from sudden death if faced with some unexpected misfortune.”⁷³ In doing so, they reenact their traumatic experience. This time, however, they set forth on a perilous and life-altering adventure of their own accord and with a clear sense of purpose: a historical mission that is willed rather than imposed. Through this arrangement, Różycki's poem harmonizes two seemingly irreconcilable narratives: the heroic and the martyrological. The text pays homage to the victimhood of the expatriates by releasing the traumatic stories of deportations, separations, and deaths that finally come to the surface as they approach the Polish-Ukrainian border. At the same time, it reconstructs the adventurous aura that communist propaganda bestowed on the expatriate community, celebrating the courage, perseverance, and commitment of those who had to build their life anew in an unfamiliar setting. The adventure romance thus stages the confrontation with the spectral, traumatic past by utilizing a heroic discourse that, despite its propagandistic origin, becomes a part of the expatriate identity. In the process, it also creates a narrative bridge between the two estranged generations, regenerating their frail bonds.

Returning to his family's history in a collection of travel essays, Tomi: Notes from a Stopping Place (2013), Różycki invokes the night when his grandparents packed their belongings before being sent on a train into the unknown. He reconstructs the scene as follows:

They can only take a few things. It needs to be decided what stays and will never be seen again. My grandmother packs the first case: some bedding, plates, pots, children's clothes, a handful of souvenirs, and the essentials, and the case is almost full. To my grandmother's dismay, the grandfather packs the other one with books, filling it to the brim with volumes from his modest library, leaving tablecloths, radio, and everything that's valuable. The box is now monstrously heavy and can barely be moved—with the help of friends and neighbors—to the station, where the train will arrive. . .⁷⁴

As the author reflects, his grandfather's decision to pack the book collection “was incredible because it was full of hope: it announced a private victory of culture over history, continuity of spirit over the chaos of violence, war, and matter. It seems my grandfather did not fully understand that he makes a salvational gesture.” Różycki interprets his grandfather's utterly impractical gesture as a triumph of humanism: culture and memory and the “continuity of spirit” prevail over violence, chaos, and survivalist materialism. However, one cannot but wonder at the peculiar composition of his grandfather's library, where Polish and world literary classics—Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Thomas Mann, Jaroslav Hašek, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Lev Tolstoi, Fedor Dostoevskii, and Victor Hugo—find themselves surrounded by staples of adventure literature: best-selling works by Jack London, James Fenimore Cooper, James Oliver Curwood, Peter May, Rafael Sabatini, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Walter Scott, and Rudyard Kipling.

The poet does not explicitly comment on the peculiar composition of this canon nor its meaning for the would-be exile. However, his Twelve Stations provides a clear enough answer: the adventure library stands for the idea that even in an uncontrollable flux of history, one can still preserve a sense of identity and agency. It is a lesson that Różycki took to heart when composing his poem. The foundational blocks of the adventure story—a vacuous yet compelling hero, a highly polarized space through which the forces of memory and forgetting wage their struggle, and a central quest that seeks to resolve this conflict—allow him to confront a trans-generational trauma by incorporating rather than dispelling the nostalgic imaginary built around the experience of expatriation. Adventure romance, a mode ostensibly open to nostalgic fantasizing, daydreaming, and excess, is particularly well suited to the task.

By adopting the structure of romance, Różycki's text welds together the compensatory and martyrological streaks of the public discourse built around eastern expulsions and settling in post-German Silesia. The resulting narrative reconstructs past events and highlights how they affect the lives of their participants and their second and third generation descendants. However, like backyard games filling the protagonist's childhood, Różycki's story also injects a dose of personal agency to counteract the destructive work of history. His recreation of the past is thus a repetition with a difference: through their joint participation in the phantasmagorical adventure, the affected generations can symbolically reclaim their narratives and confront their shared sense of loss caused by the forced migrations. More importantly, though, they reconstruct what Różycki emphatically referred to as “the continuity of spirit,” a sense of trans-generational identity. The poem is an exemplary model of how Polish postmemorial literature can productively and critically engage with the country's troubled past by trying to mend rather than merely re-invoke the cultural rifts caused by cataclysmic social and cultural disruptions like the forced resettlements. The case of Twelve Stations shows that the adventure form can play an essential part in cultural memory production, not least because of its ability to harmonize contradictory versions of that memory. In doing so, it offers us a fascinating tale and another salvational gesture.