THE ORIENTAL TRADITION IN THE CONTEMPORARY POETRY OF THE POLISH TATARS
Grzegorz Czerwiński,
University of Białystok,
Poland, Białystok 15-420, Plac Uniwersytecki 1, p. 75,
g.czerwinski@hotmail.com.
This article analyses the ways in which the oriental traditions are present in the work of the three of best known Tatar poets in Poland: Selim Chazbijewicz, Musa Czachorowski and Anna Kajtochowa. Chazbijewicz is an archetypal poet, deeply rooted in the semantics of expression and literary tradition, who views the oriental idea as a particular convention and topic. The predominant oriental motifs in his work are the archetypal space of the steppe, animism and the ritual of passage, as well as religious heresy and the idea of the unity of reality – the first three of these can be associated primarily with shamanism, and the last two – with Sufism. Czachorowski, on the other hand, can be viewed as an author of reflective and descriptive poetry, in which Tatar and Islamic motifs very often appear explicitly. In Kajtochowa’s case the lyrical subject itself has features of the shaman – the shaman of poetic language, a guide and intermediary between the Word, the world and the poetry.
Key words: Polish Tatars, contemporary Polish poetry, Selim Chazbijewicz, Musa Czachorowski, Anna Kajtochowa. The article was written as part of a research project titled “Polish Tatar literature after 1918”, funded by the Polish National Science Centre under decision No. DEC-2012/07/B/HS2/00292.
