Disenchanted Europeans

Łukasz Mikolajewski is a junior professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences, University of Warsaw, specializing in intellectual history. He wrote his doctoral thesis at the European University Institute.

‘In a feat of careful research and textual analysis, Mikołajewski captures the way these Polish exile writers moved physically and existentially across the chasm of the Second World War, adjusting their views to the massive shifts in politics and society the war entailed. In the case of Bobkowski, his wartime anti-Semitism was an element he never fully confronted. This book makes a valuable contribution to the study of modern Polish literature and modern European intellectual life.’(Laura Engelstein, Henry S. McNeil Professor Emerita of Russian History, Yale University, co-translator with Grażyna Drabik of Andrzej Bobkowski, Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940–1944)‘A great exploration of ambiguities of Polish cultural identity.’(Janusz Korek, Stockholm University)

• CONTENTS: What About Us? Polish Exiles from Kultura and the European Dilemma - Changing Images of Europe in the Writings of Stempowski: A General Overview - Anger and Disenchantment with the West: Jerzy Stempowski as a Political Exile - An Eastern European Writing about Germany and Austria in 1945 - Metaphors of Provincialization: Postwar Essays on Europe - Continuity and Rupture: Classical Self-Fashioning and Farewells to Europe - Personal Rebellion against Europe: Autobiographical Texts from 1945 to 1955 - Reassessments of Occidentalism in Sketches with a Quill - Obliterating Interwar Europeanism: Postwar Corrections in Sketches with a Quill - From Distant Lands: Travels to America in Kultura - Occidentalism and Its Discontents.