La letteratura rutena della Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodów nella ricezione critica polacca

The interest of Polish scholars in literary works written in Ruthenian or in Polish language in the borderlands of the Commonwealth varied in different periods. By the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 1930s, Poland was rather focused on the construction of her new national state and the accentuation of her civilizational mission towards Eastern Slavic literature. After World War II, the new borders of the Polish state under Communist rule directed the attention of Polish scholars and cultural dealers toward a new national conception, whose goal was to eradicate the memory of the Commonwealth and to canalize the intellectual efforts towards “truly” Polish heritage, anti-German antagonism and politically correct ideologies. However, some groundbreaking works were written in the 1960s. Radical changes appeared after 1989. Publications multiplied exponentially in the 1990s and 2000s. Post-colonial studies emerged. In Polish scholarship and culture, two main trends may be indicated: on the one hand, the need to analyze the cultural, linguistic and literary specificities of the borderlands of Ukraine and Belarus in the Lithuanian Grand principality and in the Crown territories; on the other, the need to consider in a systemic approach all the components (Ruthenian, Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, German) of society and culture of the Rzeczpospolita. The article focuses on the most interesting trends and publications of the periods indicated above.