Jerzy Ficowski’s heterotopia in „Non-diary in Other Words the Journey to Gorczaków and More Formerly“

Abstract

The subject of the article is Jerzy Ficowski’s Niepamiętnik czyli podróż do Gorczakowa i jeszcze dawniej [Non-diary in Other Words the Journey to Gorczaków and More Formerly], published in 2019. In it the poet reached for experiences of the past time, to his family roots located in distant Ukraine, deeply rooted in the culture of the Borderlands, in the space of the Gorczaków wilderness. The creator of the Non-diary considered them to be a space of his pre-childhood due to the natural inheritance of the memory of the land of his ancestors, their deeds, thoughts and reflections, which finally accumulated in the inner self of the author. They entered into his life according to his convictions that we are older than our lives and that “the sources of our memory / are further […] than within us.” In the text an attempt was made to analyse the process of the transformation of the “Ukrainian family nest” of the Ficowski family into a specific form of heterotopia – into the “Land of Holy Oblivion”. This different space was created thanks to the infiltration of what is real and concrete, “through what is imagined”.