Presence of Szela: Three Examples from the New Prose

The article presents three novels in which the person of Jakub Szela and motif of the Galician slaughter appear. These are Fairy Tale about the Snake’s Heart or Another Word about Jakub Szela (2019) by Radek Rak, Deutsch for Intermediates (2019) by Maciej Hen and Galicians (2016) by Stanisław Aleksander Nowak. The starting point for the considerations is the remark of Stanisław Aleksander Nowak who acknowledged the 1846 peasant revolt as a relevant legacy that could support present-day forms of protest against injustice and exploitation. The author of the article examines if the modern prose writers who brought the person of Jakub Szela back to life in their novels truly invoke the aforementioned tradition and if Szela is a rebel icon and an avenger model for them. The result of said examination is negative: the author proves that only pop-cultural or quasi-pop-cultural presence of Szela (in artistic literature) comes into question, which is loosely tied to the broader discussion on “the peasant question” – the so-called plebeian turn in Polish culture, which became most visible in the years of 2015–2016. The author argues that the discussed works of literature do not have the ambitions to deal with the past; the allegedly renounced or unjustly forgotten legacy of peasant resistance and rebellion weren’t claimed. Thereby the difference between the demands of the historians and sociologists who reflected anew on the situation of serfs in spirit of the so-called pedagogy of shame and today’s literary practice was revealed