An oikological reading of Kamienica za Ostrą Bramą by Wanda Niedziałkowska-Dobaczewska

Abstract

The article aims to interpret a long forgotten region-bound novel by Wanda Niedziałkowska-Dobaczewska Kamienica za Ostrą Bramą [A house behind the Gate of Dawn] (1928). The key to understanding the text, provided in its opening, is a free-form but functionally salient oikological reflection. The inhabitants of the tenement house evoked in the title, who reside there but temporarily, are united in thinking about their own Home – lost or longed for, in either case – idealised.

The tenement house of the ‘Muraviev’ prelate, its former owner, whose phantom haunts the tenants, is a miniature version of Vilnius, and the worldview of its current temporary residents is a synecdoche of the mentality of people from the northern borderlands, tired of the circumstances of living in a partitioned land, overwhelmed by mental stagnation after the war and resigned to being humiliated by the Others. The novel was an expression of the writer’s anxiety about what would become of this land in view of the socio-political situation during the interwar period.