“In our region…”, or Haupt’s “Letychiv district”

Abstract

In the article, I reflect on the spaces of inspiration, the “praił” [primordial clay] of Zygmunt Haupt’s works. I examine a unique “pronominal” spatial orientation found in his texts, his use of the prepositional phrase “u nas” [in our region], and the juxtapositions of “tam” [there] and “tu” [here], trying to establish what spaces are “hidden” behind these pronouns. I do not think that it was Ukraine, because Haupt’s texts present only its western part. On the one hand, the writer poeticized the space of “his land” and, on the other hand, he rooted it, often imprecisely, in geography. The best concretization of this space seems to be the “Letychiv district,” which transformed into a metaphor of a “place of origin,” where artists who are detached from their “praił” can look for inspiration. The changing borders of this “district” are determined only by the artist’s imagination.