Images of War in the Works of Stanisław Rembek

Abstract

Stanisław Rembek was both a historian who dealt with the past in a scientific context and a writer who created literary works based on historical events – those from the distant past and those of which the author was an eyewitness and participant. This article aims to present how in his works the writer portrayed war, showing the horror of soldiers’ experiences. In his novels he created images of everyday life in the trenches, struggles with hunger, oppressive cold, fear, and fighting to endurance limit. He noticed how the soldiers’ enthusiasm and willingness to fight under the influence of the protracted war gradually turned into fatigue, indifference and bitterness. Death was an inseparable element of the brutal descriptions of war reality present in Rembek’s works. However, it was not lofty or pathetic – the writer showed it in a naturalistic way, not avoiding drastic descriptions of the landscape after the battle. His characters felt a disharmony between the images of their heroic death and the images they witnessed every day. In his pictures of war, which were a testimony to his own experiences during the Polish-Bolshevik war (recorded in his war diary), Rembek referred to Stefan Żeromski’s naturalistic technique of depiction, Sienkiewicz’s tradition, expressionism, and Ernst Jünger’s concepts. He was accused of showing the “dirty realism of war”, which for some critics was a flaw in his work, while for others, it had a great value. However, he said: “My war is the one that it is in reality”.