„Warszawa to ja” – obraz Warszawy w felietonach Doroty Masłowskiej Mam tak samo jak ty (2023)
“Warsaw is me” – The image of Warsaw in Dorota Masłowska’s feuilletons I’m the Same Way (2023)

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to analyze the image of Warsaw that emerges while reading Dorota Masłowska’s feuilletons “I’m the Same Way”, published in 2023, that were appearing in “Tygodnik Powszechny” magazine between 2020 and 2022. The article distinguishes two main categories: the literary topos of the city as a labyrinth and the topos of the city as a theatre (theatrum mundi). These categories are subject to significant transformations and creative updates in Masłowska’s literary works, for example, the labyrinthine structure does not only concern space, but becomes a way of describing time. The writer openly refers to the topos of the world-theatre, presenting people as actors. However, she creatively enriches this topos, questions the existence of a higher order, and considers achieving harmony impossible. Masłowska even goes a step further – she doubts the existence of any director, so the responsibility is removed from an unspecified higher power and returned to people-actors who have to bear its burden themselves. The universal figure of the labyrinth is used by Masłowska to show the complexity of Warsaw’s urban space, its palimpsest structure, and the suspension between the past and the future. The maze is not only a spatial one, a tangle of corridors, alleys and unknown paths, but also a maze of smells, a maze of intertwined sounds, colours and textures. While walking around Warsaw, Masłowska experiences a special type of synaesthesia, a merging of various sensory experiences. Labyrinth as a feature of space is also transferred to other categories – time becomes a labyrinth, chaotic, expansive, arranged in a palimpsest manner. Masłowska carefully and thoughtfully builds her vision of Warsaw. She uses universal figures and images known and repeated in literature, but at the same time she interprets them from a distance, gives them new meanings, and creatively transforms them. She touches on the most contemporary issues, e.g. the alienation of people in urban space during the lockdown. In this way, an extremely rich in meaning image of Warsaw is created, which is a reflection of the longings, desires, and reflections of the author herself, a record of the experience of a city that is always well-known and always foreign at the same time. Dorota Masłowska’s collection of feuilletons is a kind of chronicle of a city, a city in constant motion, a city that Masłowska tries to tame and understand, which she tries to get to know from the inside out. During her peregrinations around the capital city, the author, like it or not, becomes integrated with the fabric of the city, Warsaw permeates and inspires her at the same time.

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