The study aims to take a closer look at the phenomenon of the nostalgic review of the past in Polish postmodern novels. Nostalgia is used as extensively as it is circulated in the contemporary culture. Nostalgia is a specific attitude of an individual, which, however, is linked to the beliefs of the collective memory. Therefore, the presence of nostalgia in literature can be approached by the notions of the collective memory or in this case the autobiographical memory as elaborated by Maurice Halbwachs. The study investigates how Pawel Huelle and Stefan Chwin construct the image of a formerly tabooed past from the traces of German culture of former Danzig and how this newly constructed image of this town became the vital part of the identity of their narrators.
Nostalgia is a characteristic of our time, and it extends more and more also to technology. Rapid technological change is as well a cause of modernisation and related social developments as a cause of reluctance to new technologies and nostalgic longing for the past. Good examples for this phenomenon are media technologies. As media are part of the world of our everyday life they are also object of personal memories. Changing and developing in the flux of time, they are no more what they used to be in a former stage of our life. Therefore they form part of an expanding culture of memory, with aspects of musealization and nostalgia. This nostalgia of the media does not only extend to the material remains (media archives, personal collections etc.) but also to their specific way of appearance and representation, the way they let us see the world generated by them. Media do increasingly devote themselves to this nostalgia of the media, which means that they rely to different historic versions of themselves or of other media. Therefore nostalgia of the media in the media is a way of self-reference of the media, because media refer to themselves as subject to historic development, remembrance, oblivion, destruction etc. But nevertheless a nostalgic attitude towards media technologies, as in the case of other technologies as well, does not exclude openness for new technological developments, but may also very well coexist with the latter.
Building on the stimuli from ontological genre theory and thematology, the study reconstructs the autobiographical line of Martin Kukučín´s work and, in a wider sense, defines the writer´s semiotic gesture present in the whole of his work. The line in question is represented by the marginalized writings, shorter in size and vaguely recognized (sketches, short stories, columns), which were not exposed to interpretation so much. Besides the „children´s“ proses, they include „retrospective“ proses, the sketch Na obecnom salaši (At the Village Sheep Farm, 1887), the novella Vianočné oblátky (Christmas Wafers, 1890), the short story Tichá voda (Quiet Water, 1892), which thematize the motifs of becoming „estranged“ (O. Čepan) or realizing the „bitterness of half-blooded status“ of a man who is a peasant by origin and an intellectual by education. The last group within the autobiographical line comprises the Prague-related proses, which present Kukučín as a confident city author, whose relationship with the environment is very specific. The central motifs of the writings – melancholy and nostalgia – show the situation of the modern era subject, typical of which is an unanchored individual, the loss of support, the disappearing world of the traditional, archaic values, and the response to the intrusion of the modern era into people´s lives. There are various passages and layers of his work where he discloses the defining moment of the essential certainties of human life (family, background, tradition) being undermined, but it is not a catastrophe moment, rather an argument, which also stems from the natural course of events, an argument of life. In conclusion, the analysed texts cast light on the distinctive attitude in Kukučín´s writing style, and definitely prove that he was the kind of author who thematized human existence full of contradictions at the dawn of modern era with confidence. Thematizing lonely feelings, being cut off roots and losing the original world integrity expressed in the motifs of melancholy and nostalgia, which gave rise to his creative activity.
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