Priceless testimonies of landscape, or environmental literary history in practice

Klaudia Węgrzyn: We have a long topic coming up, because in your scholarly and educational activities you move in fields and areas related to memory, archives, post-industrialism and the environment – ​​currently mainly in connection with Upper Silesia. You come from Knurów, live in Katowice, lecture at the University of Silesia, conduct workshops and field classes in less popular districts and on slag heaps. So you have not only developed the topic of environmental history methodologically, but above all, it is an approach. So how did you come up with environmental literary history?

Prof. Marta Tomczok: Thanks for this term! The concept of “environmental literary history” is original, but not invented, so I do not claim to have invented it. It “came out” quite naturally. Despite this, few people use it, because researchers in Poland and around the world like to call themselves humanists or environmental humanists or environmental historians, and the term "environmental history of literature" does not appear in their statements.

K.W.: Can you indicate why such a tendency occurs among researchers?

M.T.: Perhaps because many of them, when reading environmental literature, do not treat it or the method of environmental reading separately, for example in relation to ecocriticism. Ecocriticism understood broadly is a constellation of phenomena not only from the area of ​​literature, but also from the area of ​​interpreting culture. It can refer to studies of animals, plants or minerals. Environmental history of literature is simply the history of literature, taking into account primarily history itself and its environmental determinants; it has its phases, periods, courses that need to be sorted out and described, as well as key events. It seems much better anchored in what is social or economic, in how different countries have historically treated the environment, how they have regulated their relationships with it, and how literature has spoken about it. The view of environmental literary history wants to be holistic, but this whole is specific – facts, processes, breakthroughs, failed projects.

K.W: What does this research look like in Poland?

M.T.: We will find many interesting proposals that develop and strengthen the environmental history of literature – I am thinking of books and articles by Jacek Kolbuszewski, Justyna Tabaszewska, Przemysław Czapliński, Anita Jarzyna, Paweł Tomczok, Michał Kuziak, Tomasz Sobieraj or Dariusz Piechota, but I would point to Anna Barcz as the first researcher most closely associated with the topic. Her postdoctoral monograph Realizm ekologiczny. Od ekokrytyki do zookrytyki w literaturze polskiej [Ecological Realism. From Ecocriticism to Zoocriticism in Polish Literature] (Wydawnictwo Śląsk, 2016) deals primarily with studies of animals and their connections, especially in the Anglo-Saxon variety, with literary studies. Anna Barcz is certainly one of the first people to establish the Polish school of ecocriticism and develop it in several different fields – which is also interesting in her activities and can serve as an example of a multidisciplinary approach to the problem. She started with animals, and for several years she has been working on the largest Polish rivers, the Vistula and the Oder. She is currently working on a project related to floods, not only in Poland. She combines this conceptually with deep mapping.

I would also like to mention the Opus LAP project „Mapowanie kultury ostatniego zagłębia węglowego w Europie” [Mapping the culture of the last coal basin in Europe], which we have been implementing since January together with researchers from the Institute of Literary Studies and the Institute of Socio-Economic Geography and Spatial Management of the University of Silesia, Lucyna Sadzikowska, Karolina Pospiszil-Hoffmańska, Paweł Tomczok, Zbyszek Feliszewski and Robert Krzysztofik, as well as a team of literary scholars and art historians from the University of Ostrava led by Jan Malura. In the coming years, we will be developing a deep map of the Upper Silesian Coal Basin in the environmental aspect. It will include all past, present and future objects related to heavy industry, from steelworks to mines, spoil heaps, sinkholes and post-industrial areas. This history will be supplemented with literary and visual contexts, so there will be books, graphics, films and architecture. The project is multilingual: we have English, Czech, Polish, Silesian and German.

K.W.: Apart from the linguistic-industrial-geographic-geological complexity, such a project will probably also bring together humanists and naturalists – how does such cooperation and developing a common language look like?

M.T.: The biggest challenge that we face is to think with the team about how to create a map of mining and geological phenomena based on literature and art. We have had several such discussions, but the key one took place at the Polish Geological Institute. There I talked about searching for places that go beyond typical geolocation, such as a specific address on a given street – or at least about literature following hard coal deposits. For example, the Bobrek Coal Mine in Bytom and its specific deposits – somehow you have to put that on a map, right? And a three-dimensional map at that. At some point, listening to my stories, he waved his hand and said: well, that will be a map for humanities. I started to wonder how to find a balance between the expectations of geologists or geographers and the possibilities of literary scholars. We want to develop a method so that the recipients of the map will not later complain that what we are trying to tell through literature or art is confined to metaphors and symbols, and is not a real representation that can help understand the environment and the history of its changes. I think that there are many such possibilities that only literature offers. Mapping industrial environments is one of them.

K.W.: Was the scientific conference and later the collective publication  Środowiska industrialne/postindustrialne zależności (w literaturze i kulturze polskiej od XIX do XXI wieku) [Industrial/postindustrial dependencies (in Polish literature and culture from the 19th to the 21st century)] a similarly conceived project?

M.T.: In this publication, fans of heavy industry will find many interesting topics for themselves. However, there are also articles by culture experts - for example, Mateusz Chaberski and Małgorzata Sugiera from the Department of Performance Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow or Jessica Kufa, a PhD student at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Silesia, about slag heaps, as well as texts by Paweł Tomczok and Lucyna Sadzikowska from Katowice. All of these are interesting studies from an environmental perspective - not only literary - but more broadly, humanistic and environmental.

K.W.: One of the last projects you were also responsible for (in cooperation with the aforementioned Paweł Tomczok) is the the translation of Ralph Crane's book Coal. Nature and Culture. How does this global history meet the local, Silesian one? 

M.T.: Not necessarily in a literal sense. We liked what was not yet in the story of Polish coal – the historical approach to culture, the presentation of interesting literary examples, the excellently presented visual history of the industry. Crane is an extremely brilliant literary scholar who also reads its environmental influences and socio-political entanglements. We decided that such an approach could also be inspiring for Polish humanities.

K.W.: If we are combining the thread of academic analyses and the environment, it is worth talking about the latest project of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Silesia – that is, the newly established course of interdisciplinary humanities studies on the environment. Were you involved in its development? What kind of classes and syllabuses can we expect?

M.T.: I had the pleasure of working in a wonderful team led by Ania Kałuża, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, responsible for academic teaching. In addition to literary scholars, it also includes philosophers, historians, art historians and cultural scholars. I have developed classes related to industrial landscapes, field humanities and energy studies, some of which will be conducted outside the walls of the academy, in the form of hikes or walks.

K.W.: A multidisciplinary and multifaceted approach to the environment seems to be your current main method of research – what does it look like in practice, how are you received in the academy and outside of it?

M.T.: Environmental history is useful wherever you need to talk about the environment that is changing, disappearing, undergoing various transformations or deformations. As a rule, environmental history itself – as practiced in Poland by Adam Izdebski and Małgorzata Praczyk – is history based on sources interpreted in a modern way. When attending environmental conferences outside Poland, I have noticed that literature is often treated with a certain reserve or distance. Historians present their investigations primarily based on factual data and maps. Literature appears there rarely, so environmental history of literature is also a niche of environmental history itself. Why is that? I don't know, but I think it may also be a question of traditional scientific ontology and whether literature and culture tell the truth or not. I think that every person who wants to use concepts related to their area and environment more subtly and precisely, i.e. not limit themselves to the broad concept of environmental humanities, but call themselves an environmental historian of literature, should have many questions about what this history of environmental literature really is and how to describe its phenomenon. How to describe activities so that they become credible for social sciences, for example, which use other types of data. However, there is an interdisciplinary solution, one in which a historian of literature does not limit their possibilities, does not limit their work only to the history of literature, but also deals with history, culture, art history, the history of visuality, anthropology, ethnography or sociology. Here, skills in collecting data in the area of ​​interviews, analyzing these interviews, that is, creating narratives and so on are useful. I think that this is what gives the best results. But it is also essential to believe that literature or art can provide more solid knowledge than what we have previously thought they provide. Literature, to put it banally, is more than a tangle of metaphors, metonyms, symbols. It is worth strengthening the belief that this is the case and that both writers and artists can know more. This is really important.

K.W.: Speaking of seeing more and encapsulating it in literature – I hasten to refer with great impatience to your own turn towards such a narrative and your own writing practice. You are leaving not only the classrooms and lecture halls, but also strictly university writing. Are you currently working on a reportage book?

M.T.: Yes, that's right. It will be a book about people displaced after the war from villages where large-scale industry was being built. I spent a lot of time discovering what these places were and how they were transformed. While working on the book, I became convinced that literature is an invaluable source of knowledge about environmental history. Literature can become a reliable source of knowledge about changes and a story about the past from several decades ago, which no other source can give us. Of course, provided that we define this literature broadly enough and that we also consider memoirs, folk literature, folk poems, a large area of ​​what we would once call self-generated literature, interviews and reports, of course, yes, that's the basis.

K.W: In your searches, you expand not only the field of literature, but also archives and visual works. During conference presentations, classes with students or workshops with school youth, you reach for painting, illustration and photographic materials - however, they do not only create a background for academic considerations - they constitute the basis of analysis. Which images and plates have been most important to you so far?

M.T.: For example, the images of slag heaps from the series made in the 1930s by Rafał Malczewski, found in the book published by the Gliwice Museum - Fedruję śląski Krajobraz [I mine the Silesian landscape]. Malczewski - while staying for some time in Upper Silesia at the invitation of the voivode Michał Grażyński - first made numerous sketches of the landscape. Most of these sketches have been lost. They were the basis of his later paintings. For a long time, these works were considered primarily an artistic cycle. Many regionalists wrote about it – for example Wilhelm Szewczyk. Painting in the thirties was also associated with intellectual and political discussions about the nature of Silesia. The breakthrough moment, when art related to the industry in Upper Silesia was included in the real, environmental imagination, was the organization of an exhibition and then the publication of a monograph of KRON (Tyski Klub Fotograficzny KRON. Śląsk 1978-1983). Not all members of the group came from Silesia – on the contrary, they were rather people who, when photographing Silesia at the turn of the seventies and eighties, often did not fully know which places they were moving through. The photographs collected in this book, compared to the paintings of Rafał Malczewski, create an incredible amount of interdependencies and analogies between how Silesia was painted in the thirties, already paying attention to various environmental phenomena, and how the so-called "Black Silesia" was photographed in the times of late communism. At that time, journalists were becoming increasingly critical of the prevailing discourse, praise, enthusiasm and the concealment of many social problems. 

Virtually everything in their photos is a big surprise. We have more and more examples of more environmentally engaged journalism at the turn of the seventies and eighties – these are also increasingly powerful documents of the death of the landscape in newly industrialized regions. However, Silesia is not at all a leading region here with a high mortality rate of people and plants. In these photos – among people and nature – something we call a lunar landscape is created. It is here that it occurs on a large scale and is visible in a purely technical sense, because it is very often a large-format photograph, with a wide-angle lens, panoramic. An environmental historian, a historian of environmental art, environmental graphics should ask about these relations occurring, for example, between photographs and painting. It is necessary to consider where these places were photographed and painted – what kind of representation and narrative they create. And this is where environmental literary history comes into play, with interviews, reenactments and retrospections – searching for priceless evidence of landscapes and environments that have passed away and may no longer have any other sources than these photographs or those paintings.

K.W.: The Silesian region and its artistic output are mainly associated with the so-called primitive or amateur painting represented by the Janowska Group – do you also look for community narratives in it?

M.T.: I find the imagination of Paweł Wróbel’s environment, who was from Szopienice, extraordinary, although he moved around various districts of Katowice. He didn’t travel much, which he himself says in an interesting film about districts near Szopienice, i.e. Janów, Nikiszowiec, Giszowiec, astonishing. Wróbel tried to create slightly less representational painting – in the style of horror vacui. Unlike the KRON photographs or Malczewski’s paintings, this representation cannot be pinned down one to one. One of the Szopienice paintings also includes four additional districts of Katowice. At least Katowice, if not other memories that Wróbel brings to these paintings to explain what his philosophy of painting was based on. After Wróbel, a few memories and the film material I mentioned have survived – available on the digital television reconstruction channel. And this is what seems extremely important to me in the environmental approach: trusting the artist. We are not dealing here with apparent perversity, but rather with straightforwardness. That is why there is a spoil heap in the background obscuring the horizon. This is the time when Haldex – a Hungarian company – appears on Polish territory. Wilhelm Szewczyk also writes about it, because he was one of the consultants of this company. In various texts, he later complained that spoil heaps are becoming primarily objects for demolition, for hardening roads, for construction purposes. However, spoil heaps officially have no defenders, apologists or environmental philosophers at that time. There are no laws or regulations – it is not yet the time in the legislation to impose on mines the obligation to “clean up after themselves” – mines can govern themselves however they want and wherever they want. It was not until the mid-1960s that the first attempts were made to sort out environmental issues and impose such obligations on industrial plants. This has nothing to do with Silesia specifically, but with the development of the so-called industrialized areas such as Puławy, Konin or Tarnobrzeg. Thanks to the discoveries of many deposits in the late 1950s and mid-1960s, construction of several strong industrial centers in Poland began – Turów, Płock, Bełchatów. The plants planned there would eventually become truly harmful to the environment and would wreak havoc, and it is mainly because of them that the legislation would have to change. 

These repercussions also come into play in Silesia – industrialization and mines begin to sort things out. At that time, painters also start to hold their heads in disbelief, because they were not used to it. This is exactly what affects Wróbel, and he, like a little boy, wants to take the slag heaps and parts of districts to his room, clean them up and hide them from the terrible bulldozers that are clearing the landscape.

K.W.: It is commonly said that in many districts of Katowice itself – as well as in other centres – the mines were their heart: they were the breadwinners, but at the same time also the poisoners. Can the same be said about the place of spoil heaps in the life of the community and the environment itself?

M.T.: Reading literature and watching art from the Polish People's Republic, I noticed that there are many connections between slag heaps and their inhabitants. Many people like slag heaps, play on slag heaps, live surrounded by slag heaps and develop some kind of relationship with slag heaps. Generally speaking: slag heaps provide an opportunity to survive crises, to hide - even in quite nightmarish and dangerous conditions. In interwar literature, Gustaw Morcinek and Pola Gojawiczyńska write about poor houses, especially on zinc heaps. Kazimierz Kutz also points to this possibility, for example in his film Perła w koronie [Pearl in the Crown] or Lech Majewski in Angelus. Of course, slag heaps are also a place for animals, a place for grazing - and not only in Silesia - for goats, for example. In the future, these heaps – because the word heap is, as my geographer colleague Robert Krzysztofik says, strongly attached to Upper Silesia – non-Silesians, for example people from Tarnobrzeg or Bełchatów, will not say heap, but rather heaps, heaps or heaps – sometimes referring to much more monstrous objects than Silesian heaps. So it will be grazing cows, geese, but most often goats, a symbol of poverty and misery of this environment. In the interwar photographs by Jan Bułhak, goats pose against the background of zinc pits ungrown with vegetation. Heaps will also be an area for establishing interpersonal relationships, including the most important ones, i.e. love relationships. In the descriptions of Gustaw Morcinek, who also very specifically showed this love as something improper, hidden – heaps will serve lovers as a space for hiding passions. In principle, however, the slag heaps will become a place that is perfectly allied, in a sense equal to local communities. They will show the boundaries of towns and villages, impoverished and somehow humiliated places. Life by and on the slag heaps experienced something that we would call ecological injustice today, that is, it was immersed in ecological poverty and forced by industrial barons, and later by the authorities of the Polish People's Republic, to live in conditions that directly endangered the health and life of the inhabitants – human and non-human.

K.W.: You have already described frames and visual moments that are significant to you, what literary and narrative works or fragments are equally close to you? Which descriptions of the literary environment have stayed with you for longer?

M.T.: There are a few autochthons, for example the aforementioned Wilhelm Szewczyk, Leon Wantuła, who were born at a time when the slag heaps were no longer just enemies of people. Then relationships are created, thanks to which the spoil heaps become somewhat similar to them, and they become similar to the spoil heaps. For example, there is a very interesting story by Morcinek from Narodziny serca [The Birth of the Heart] written at a time when people were not thinking about sociology or ecology. There is ecological awareness and sensitivity in it, his ability to describe space, an incredible weakness - in a positive sense - for spoil heaps as an environment that he knows inside and out. I personally consider such literature to be important and valuable sources of knowledge that I will not find anywhere else in documents or reports on such a scale, with so many descriptions. This is such an interestingly documented relationship of a local with a spoil heap and an incredibly valuable description of a burning spoil heap.

A separate discovery is the literary area of ​​reportage from the interwar period. For example, a book published in 1981 by Wojciech Janot in the Silesia Publishing House with reprinted reports from different times: anonymous texts and well-known writers, including Maria Dąbrowska, Ferdynand Goetel, Pola Gojawiczyńska, Kornel Makuszyński, Gustaw Morcinek. These authors observe what is happening to Silesia precisely in times of crisis, they observe people, local activities, poorhouses and of course also the incredibly degraded space. This time of observation begins in the early thirties and still with this enthusiasm and joy of the rebuilt Silesia, only then does it turn into a deep crisis. 

There is a fragment of a very interesting report by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz – Fotografie ze Śląska [Photographs from Silesia]. I was not able to establish exactly what the writer was doing in Katowice. Everything indicates, however, that he viewed Katowice from the perspective of a Varsovian in a black limousine. Nevertheless, his vivid imagination and narration create a masterful description of the environment and the spoil heaps themselves. Remaining in memory like the best photographs.

The publication was created as part of the project „Polonistyka wobec wyzwań współczesnego świata”, co-financed from the state budget under the program of the Minister of Education and Science called „Nauka dla Społeczeństwa II” (project number: NdS-II/SP/0264/2024/01).