Herbert’s Postcolonial Antiquity and Defensive Nationalism
Journal: Roczniki Humanistyczne
Year: 2019

The Polish version of this article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 65, issue 1 (2017). This paper proposes a postcolonial reading of antiquity motifs from Zbigniew Herbert’s po-ems from the times of socialism. References to ancient history, mythology, and biblical allusions are interpreted as allegories of the political culture in the Polish People’s Republic. While in his poems written between 1956 and 1990 Herbert depicts communism as an attempt at Russian colonization of Poland,