Eine kleine trup – thast is, A Carpet with an Inlay: A Polish crime novel – a description of a few examples (with the suggestion of theory)

Abstract

The Polish crime novel, especially written after 1989, raises several research questions. The first is a question about the chronology of Polish literature, and at the same time – the dependence of its development on political changes. Second –whether such changes actually had (or have) an impact on, for example, formalissues related to the shape of this literature. Perhaps the political changes could have influenced the taking up of topics that were previously impossible to describe.

This study aims to describe and analyze the Polish detective novel from a slightly different perspective, namely to describe it as a certain object. Therefore, chronological issues will not play a major role here; will be treated as an auxiliary parameter. On the other hand, the article will emphasize the importance of the thesis that the crime novel becomes, just after 1989, a novel of a moral and psychological nature. It also shows a tendency towards something that the authors themselves describe as a “crime comedy”. Therefore, the article contains an outline of the research problem (a literary work as an object), and the main thesis is the independence of formal issues from the issues of political change; research methods are primarily a description of the object, resp. of a literary work and its features such as: the setting (specific and described precisely or schematically), the language of the protagonists/antagonists/narrator (conventional or individualized, with intertextual allusions), conventional or individualized characters, a riddle (the most important, pretext, reveals the second bottom). I try to show that political changes have influenced the taking up of topics that were previously impossible to describe. On the other hand, the very issues of political changes on the sphere of composition affect only the linguistic layer of the works.