People's Warsaw / Popular Warsaw

The Spaces of Dream: Lutosławski's Modernist Heterotopias

“…70 Contradicting the Party's public discourse regarding homes (they were not meant to become 'sites of consumption where commonplace things were appropriated into personal, "interior" spaces of memory and association'), 71 Varsovians from peasants to the intelligentsia enacted a 'creative occupancy of the standard flat'; avant-garde theatre company Teatr Osobny Trzech Osób (The Individual Theatre of Three Individuals) even staged productions in its members' apartments. As David Crowley writes in Warsaw, his evocative study of public and private spaces in Lutosławski's home city post-Second World War, while Westerners might have imagined Warsaw to be 'a place of drab and unrelenting concrete buildings' forming 'an index of the grey "reality" of late Eastern Bloc socialism' (David Bowie and Joy Division evoked Warsaw 'as the site of a prolonged catastrophe'), it was not only the tempo of life in Warsaw that felt different for most citizens (not so much 'prolonged catastrophe' as time endlessly dragging by while one queued).…”

“…As David Crowley writes in Warsaw, his evocative study of public and private spaces in Lutosławski's home city post-Second World War, while Westerners might have imagined Warsaw to be 'a place of drab and unrelenting concrete buildings' forming 'an index of the grey "reality" of late Eastern Bloc socialism' (David Bowie and Joy Division evoked Warsaw 'as the site of a prolonged catastrophe'), it was not only the tempo of life in Warsaw that felt different for most citizens (not so much 'prolonged catastrophe' as time endlessly dragging by while one queued). 70 Contradicting the Party's public discourse regarding homes (they were not meant to become 'sites of consumption where commonplace things were appropriated into personal, "interior" spaces of memory and association'), 71 Varsovians from peasants to the intelligentsia enacted a 'creative occupancy of the standard flat'; avant-garde theatre company Teatr Osobny Trzech Osób (The Individual Theatre of Three Individuals) even staged productions in its members' apartments. 72 Nonetheless, such acts may also have sharpened people's awareness of the problems of their surroundings.…”

“…70 Contradicting the Party's public discourse regarding homes (they were not meant to become 'sites of consumption where commonplace things were appropriated into personal, "interior" spaces of memory and association'), 71 Varsovians from peasants to the intelligentsia enacted a 'creative occupancy of the standard flat'; avant-garde theatre company Teatr Osobny Trzech Osób (The Individual Theatre of Three Individuals) even staged productions in its members' apartments. 72 Nonetheless, such acts may also have sharpened people's awareness of the problems of their surroundings. 'The neglect and blankness of common spaces' , Crowley suggests, 'was all the more apparent in Warsaw because it was in sharp contrast to the careful production of domesticity' -not least in the case of Lutosławski's tasteful yet chic, and eminently Ty i Ja-worthy, private home on Warsaw's ul.Śmiała, to which his family had escaped from a crowded block of flats by the time he composed Les espaces.…”

Socialism, Synecdoche, and Tadeusz Konwicki’s Palace of Culture

“…As a symbol of an imposed ideology, the Palace might have easily suffered from discursive neglect as did many Imperial Russian structures ignored by nineteenth-century Polish authors, 15 or as happened with the Palace itself after the October Thaw in 1956 when the building disappeared from official propaganda. 16 Whether because of its size, central location, or aesthetic qualities, the Palace became the sight of a critical cultural and political discourse. This shifting signification of the Palace of Culture occurred, in large part, under the pen of Konwicki, whose literary and cinematic treatment of the Stalinist edifice shaped an entire generation's perception of its symbolism and meaning.…”