From Centre to Province: Changing images of Europe in the writings of Jerzy Stempowski

Abstract

Residing after World War II in Berne, Jerzy Stempowski was one of the key essayists associated with the influential Polish émigré periodical Kultura. The chapter offers a brief overview of the way his writing on Europe evolved in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s: an initial idealization of the West European empires and its political acumen gave way to a profound disenchantment with them in the late 1930s, and a simultaneous revaluation of Eastern Europe. Stempowski’s reconsideration of Europe with its internal divisions deepened further in the postwar years, when as an exile he elaborated new metaphors of the European provincialization and wrote multiple travelogues from Western Europe.