The Experience of Urbanity in Contemporary Polish Literature

The presented reflections constitute an attempt to decipher the 20th century history recorded in written statements by one chosen aspect of the (post-) war trauma, that is, architecture and related spatial practices. The objective of this articles is to depict main models of perception and the description of urban spaces, as well as models recorded in contemporary literature and those that are a textual formula for the experience exceeding beyond the architectural-aesthetic dimension towards a political, cultural and social reflection. The reading of contemporary Polish literature leads through a matter from which the textual description of cities is built to an actual matter - to the building material of both the 20th century architectural and historical landscapes. The culture of burghers, which has introduced the tenement house life (including that fictional) into the Polish experience so late and for such a short time, has soon found an epilogue in the shape of a brick torn from a building and the (anti-) aesthetics of post- war ruins. The trauma (also the spatial one), the annihilation of cities, including the most significant - Warsaw, is verbalized in anti- fictional forms of anti- diaries, whose authors often are residents of symbols of reconstruction, socialism, and oblivion, erected after the war - districts of slab block housing estates that "block" with their cement weight the access to what is hidden beneath the lawns - the trauma. The author proposes to specify out of the former century three types of urban perception, treated here conventionally, whose symbols are: a tenement house/ruin and the construction material characteristic of Polish dilapidated buildings, i.e., a brick; post- war complexes, both institutional and residential, constructed from giant concrete slabs; lastly, stones of Western Europe seen with the eyes of a "barbarian" from beyond the Iron Curtain - a synonym of aesthetization of the observed reality.