Cierpienie przestrzeni środka
In Search of Lost Greatness

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with fascination with South-Slavic nations in Poland in 1930s, as it manifested itself with personages of not infrequently differing political views. The authors argue that the Slavophil current of the time began approaching Bulgarians and nations then inhabiting Yugoslavia as a new point of reference to the northern Slavdom, in opposition to the latitude-parallel paradigm whereby only products and creations of the Western civilisation were valorised in positive terms whilst Slavs were condemned to merely copying those. Under a new geographical/ideological vision of the continent, the West was disappearing, as was (the Bolshevik) Russia, treated as an area of ‘female’ revolutionary hysteria, for ‘manhood’, which before then had provided grounds for Russia’s striving for hegemony, had ‘tumbled down’ together with the Tsar. Now, it was the South to become an almost mythical source of might, a magical place. This enthusiasm for the Slavic South also had a clear gender aspect to it.

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