Sacred space of memory in Andrzej Stasiuk’s novel “The River of Childhood”

Abstract

The authors of the article focus on the sacred and profane, individual and collective manifestations of the river topos as a space of memory in Andrzej Stasiuk’s book “River of Childhood”, considering the artistic representations and reinterpretations of the concepts of small homeland and childhood. The study interprets the fundamental image of the Bug River in the novel and its transformation through the writer’s memories from a real and profane, natural-geographical object into a sacred symbol of the border, transition, chaos, time, transience, and death. Particular attention is paid to the ambivalence of the river symbol: in the interpreted novel, the river simultaneously attracts and threatens, evokes admiration and fear, shapes the first existential feelings and experiences, which later become the foundation of creative intentions and remain as signs of difficult memory and complex experience. The multifaceted symbolism of the river is analysed on the basis of the classical concepts of Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Manfred Lurker, Jerzy Bartmiński, and Władysław Kopaliński, who interpret the river as a universal symbol of the flow of life, death, and rebirth, an archetypal boundary between worlds and between different dimensions of human experience. The river symbol encompasses both the energy of creation and destruction, being a place of love, crime, and death; in sacred interpretations, it personifies prophecy, the book of the covenant, and salvation, while simultaneously marking the boundary between sin and repentance, purgatory and paradise. The heterogeneous symbolism of the river in Stasiuk’s novel is embodied as a sacred axis of the world (axis mundi), which unites the individual experience of childhood with the universal laws of being. The river symbolism in the interpreted novel is not only a topography of memory, but also a special “language of childhood”, through which the writer’s narrative of returning to the origins is constructed. The sacred space of memory in Stasiuk’s novel manifests itself in the ancestral concept of confession and repentance: memory becomes the flow of the river that brings salvation from the traumatic experiences of the past. The river simultaneously preserves childhood memories and enables the overcoming of painful recollections – a symbolic washing away of sins in the water of the River of Childhood. In Stasiuk’s novel, the river embodies the essential features of a universal mythological and sacred-biblical image, closely intertwined with profane folk beliefs, in which the writer’s individual memory resonates with collective archetypal notions of rebirth, transience, death, and eternity. The approach proposed in this research combines literary interpretation with cultural-anthropological and archetypal-symbolic dimensions, emphasising the importance of the small homeland and the sacred topography of childhood in contemporary Polish literature. Future studies of Andrzej Stasiuk’s works should employ an interdisciplinary interpretation, encompassing the problems of literary anthropology, cultural geography and geopoetics, philosophy of memory, and comparative literary studies, which will enable new readings of Stasiuk’s prose and deepen the understanding of his literary phenomenon within the context of modern Ukrainian literary scholarship.