It is difficult to imagine two writers less alike on the surface than Zbigniew Herbert and Andrzej Stasiuk. Herbert’s work garnered international acclaim, even nominations for the Nobel Prize, for his deep and considered engagement with the complicated legacy of the Enlightenment, a refreshingly ironic appropriation of Classical themes, and moralizing anti-Communism. Herbert’s work is undoubtedly a significant contribution to the broad, internationalist European tradition which he both draws from and critiques, offering a wide array of potential citations for the critic looking to situate Poland as a decidedly “European” country. Stasiuk, on the other hand, is notable for a more parochial orientation. Focusing his gaze more to the south and east of the Vistula, Stasiuk tends to occupy himself with regional, often even local, themes. His prose does not bear the stamp of a classical education. Far from treating the exemplary moments and individuals of History, Stasiuk seems fascinated with those which do not fit into such narratives. Quite the opposite of Herbert, Stasiuk appraises the West (for lack of a better heuristic) mistrustfully, even hostilly.

The two writers orient their language in opposite directions, Herbert outwards towards a shared European experience, Stasiuk inwards towards an idiosyncratically Polish, better Galician, experience. Should a sensitive reader look past this contrast in their narrative orientation and choice of subject matter, however, the two writers develop strikingly similar metaphysics of place. This assonance of historico-spatial experience in their respective texts is particularly interesting given the clear distinctions between their work as outlined above. What follows is a brief outline of the similarities and what I take to be the meaningful differences between two authors whose work begs comparative reading.

Turning to the texts, a consideration of Stasiuk’s Place alongside Herbert’s Among the Dorians provides an excellent point of departure. Both pieces address the experience of examining ruins. In Place, the narrative observer considers the abandoned foundations of a Greek Catholic church which has been disassembled and relocated away from the ghost town it formerly served. Herbert’s piece is taken from his travelogue series Barbarian in the Garden and reflects on the ruins of a Greco-Roman temple at Paestum. The examination of sanctified structures in disuse prompts, in both cases a considered mediation on the frequently disregarded presence of history as experienced through space. Ruins are a physical manifestation of the past persisting into the present and not just the objects of a past time but the values, beliefs, traumas, and joys which constituted a human experience both like and unlike our own. Time is open. The past is present. In both pieces tourists clamor over the ruins snapping photos, apparently oblivious to the temporal depth of the space they inhabit:

At dawn when the deities of the heavens were worshipped or at sunset, the time of subterranean powers, a procession headed by a priest approached the altar…. So it was. Now excursions linger and indifferent guides repeat the temple’s dimensions with an accountant’s accuracy, providing the number of missing columns as if to excuse the ruin. They point toward the altar, but this forsaken stone stirs no emotions. If the tourists had any imagination, instead of clicking their Kodaks, they would bring an ox and slaughter it in front of the altar.

I am no lover of ruins. But the vision of a renovated sanctuary standing in the middle of other houses and implements uprooted from their time and place in the same way bears the taint of one-dimensionality. Learned experts will argue over the Ruthenization or Latinization of friezes and paintings. The elements of Baroque and Byzantine will compete with one another, dimensions will be calculated, and someone will definitively determine the type and purity of its form. But places cannot be carried off. A place does not have dimensions. It is both a fixed point and intangible space. That is why I still wasn’t sure if it had really been taken away. The man closed his camera case.

“Where is the place where the entrance used to be?” he asked

“Here. You’re standing at the threshold.”

It is interesting in both cases that 1) the author eschews an excessively academic orientation towards the space which seeks to identify and name every historical and temporal dimension and 2) the single-dimensionality of absorption in the present moment of the photographer. There is something lacking in the photograph– it is a sort of spatio-temporal taxidermy, a moment pulled out of the context of other moments which it “inhabited”, which generated its meaning. Likewise in the academic listing, measuring, and establishing of taxonomies there is a lack of engagement with the relic in its extrasensory presentness in favor of a measured quantification of its physical and temporal form. What both of these approaches to space, the academic and the photographic, are lacking is the “imagination” to even notice the door that space opens to the past, let alone walk through it. Behind this door is not just a single past but Hellenic, Roman, German, Polish, Greek, pre-War, post-War, scientific, religious, local, international, peaceful, violent, recorded, and unrecorded pasts.

Each piece demonstrates in its own way a hermeneutic structure to the phenomenology of spatial experience. It is not just a matter of how the past makes itself known in the present but how it is interpreted by the individual. Herbert’s experience of the ruins is contextualized by a great deal of mythological and historical reflection, drawing on a variety of topics from the genesis of the Eleatic school in the Hellenic colonies, the techniques of Greek architects, the rise and decline of the city of Paestum, the relation of architecture and philosophy, relations between Hellenic colonists and the local population, and much else. Whether this bevy of historical information was known to Herbert on his arrival to Italy or his acquisition of this knowledge was occasioned by the visit, it is clear that his narrative perspective benefits immensely from his being informed in this way. If there is a deficiency to the academic attitude there are clear benefits from a poetic engagement with the fruits of the scholar’s labor. Opposed to this informed engagement with a past illuminated by space, consider Herbert’s disappointment with the pauvre veillard who as a child was eye-witness to Van Gogh’s stay in Arles. When the old man’s recollections amount to the legendary artist’s red hair and the bullying he roused from the local children, Herbert is unimpressed with “the little man’s memories about the prophet”. Herbert’s implicit claim is that an extensive knowledge of the historical significance of a place is necessary to provoke the deep imaginative engagement he describes.

Stasiuk, in all likelihood, would have taken more interest in the old peasant’s recollections as an opportunity to get to know Arles for-itself rather than the Arles of Van Gogh. His reflections on the vacated church are of more tightly circumscribed historical scope. The church is not a famous one, yet for the local parishioners it held all the significance of any celebrated cathedral. The events which Stasiuk reflects upon in Place are not of world-historical import, they barely constitute local curiosities. Perhaps most profound is the return of the displaced descendants of the locals;

Not long ago, when the eastern border was opened up, the builders’ descendants began to turn up here, fifty years after they had left, displaced from their home villages by brute force or by deceit. Old women stepped over the church’s threshold, entered the nave, kneeled on the clayey mud, since the floor was by now long gone, crossed themselves and bowed down low to the ground. To whom?… The interior reeked like a cellar. But the women kneeled.

Even with the removal of the church’s exterior, its re-integration to the wider, de-sacralized world from which it was formerly enclosed, the women who remember the place as it was, who remember a vanished world, continue to interact with the space of their memories rather than the space of their material present. Similarly, Stasiuk’s narrator remembers walking alongside a paralyzed old man on a cart who had been displaced when the village was abandoned; “It was a tour through the village that existed in his memory. Neither time, nor flames, nor frailty could touch it”.  So history is accessible not only in books but through the memories of old folks. Contrary to Herbert’s dismissal of the little old man in Arles, Stasiuk sources his historical information from the personal memories of living individuals, erudite or otherwise.