Time Lost – Time Regained – Time Separated. Essay on the Writing by Róża Ostrowska

Abstract

The aim of this article is to interpret two novels by Róża Ostrowska (1926–1975) – Wyspa (1960) and unfinished, published posthumously Czas mój osobny (1977) – which occupy an important place in Polish literature of the 1950s and 1960s. These novels take place in two time-space – nowadays in Kashubia and in the past in the Vilnius region. For the writer, these are significant   autobiographical places. In the construction of the story and characters, Ostrowska used her own life experience. This is, therefore, a writing based on autobiography and self-fiction. The writer used personal experience to take up important issues regarding human existence (life, passing away, love, death) and identifying. In these novels, an important philosophy of humanity is inscribed. The basic key to reading them is time – an individual time, an interoralized one, a “separate one” – associated with human existence and the functioning of human memory. The way the time worked in these novels allowed the writer to introduce into the structure of her novel a myth of a place and an individual. Our analysis leads to interesting conclusions: first of all, Ostrowska’s prose turns out to be an original combination of autobiography (or rather self-fiction) with mythology, whose aim is not so much the elevation of past or present reality, but rather the creation of a kind of “necro-narration”, taken as if from the post-mortem perspective. Therefore, Wyspa and Mój czas osobny are not political, moral or psychologicalnovels, but mythical ones.