The end of the world nobody noticed: The Belorussian ‘Year without a Summer’ and Jan Barszczewskis fantastic stories of the imagination

This essay is a new reading of Jan Barszczewski's collection of stories Szlachcic Zawalnia czyli Białoruś w fantastycznych opowiadaniach [Nobleman Zawalnia, or Belarus in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination] in the context of the 19th-century reception of the Arabian Nights and, more importantly, as an example of a genre which combines the oral and the literary traditions to express the identity-fostering experience of living at a time of upheaval and epochal change. This approach has little interest in revisiting the connections between Barszczewski's tales and Belorussian folklore. Instead, it places his stories in their direct historical context, i.e. a series of famines in Belarus the first decades of the 19th century, and the significance of 1816, the year in which the action of the stories is set. It is no coincidence that it was also the Year without a Summer, a catastrophic global climate anomaly, which made a great impact on the Romantic imagination.