The Image of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) in Janusz Krasiński’s Pentalogy

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 65, issue 1 (2017). This article reconstructs the image of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) in the monumental pentalogy by Janusz Krasiński, one of the most important achievements of Polish literature after 1989. In his works Krasiński showed Poland in the years 1945–1989 from the perspective of Szymon Bolesta, who at the age of 18 was falsely accused by the Communists of espionage and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The prison experience and Bolesta’s later literary career makes the reader perceive the PRL as a hostile, alien and dangerous entity, based on violence and lies, arousing fear, destroying human souls and trying to create a new non-human ethics.