Berlin—Moscow—Harbin—Lviv: People and Places, as seen in the Biography of Teodor Parnicki

Tomasz MARKIEWKA

Abstract

Teodor Parnicki’s historical novels are marked by a specific critical approach to the problems of historical truth, the credibility of the sources, and the interpretation of past events. His literary works exude relativism, conditionality and inconclusiveness, which were triggered by his biography, in particular by his early life. It is worth noting that the kind of prose he wrote was the opposite of the Polish tradition of historical novel, which makes it rather difficult to see his output as manifesting this tradition. The article attempts to provide ordered information on the writer’s early life, which he spent in Germany, Russia, China, and in the Poland of the interwar period, as can be seen in the light of non-fiction sources related to Parnicki’s life, such as his letters, memories, and lectures, some of which have been published already after the writer’s death. The reconstruction of the places in which Parnicki lived and the proposed insight into the ways particular persons affected the development of his personality are made with a view to establishing how events from his biography contributed to the shape of his novels.

Translated by Dorota Chabrajska