Egzotyka Białoszewskiego
Białoszewski’s Exoticism

Summary/Abstract: The category “exoticism” can serve as an interpretative key to Miron Białoszewski’s poetryand prose, largely omitted in previous studies. One can apply this category both to worksthat constitute accounts of distant journeys and to existential and epistemologicalsituations, as foreignness and the need to tame it concern the entire external space:from the apartment through the housing estate and Warsaw to distant countriesand the Cosmos. However, the subject of the article concerns exoticism understoodnarrowly, including geographical and cultural foreignness of mainly non-Europeancharacter. Exoticism exists in the native country in the form of multiculturalism andin language, especially in street names, which stimulates the imagination. Variousattitudes characterize the traveler’s approach to the sphere of foreignness: defensive,evasive, invasive, and revolutionary. Moreover, the article assigns to them the followingfigures (roles): a tourist who pretends to be an explorer, a conquistador, or a native.Białoszewski travels to test his preconceived ideas about countries, but exotic motifsreturn in many of his reminiscences from his travels, shaping the worlds presented in hisworks on various matters and filling his language with even greater exoticism.

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