Mitologia piastowska – forma, funkcja, kontekst w pomnikach okresu PRL na Ziemiach Odzyskanych

Abstract

Mythology of of the Piast dynasty — form, function and context in the monuments of the Polish People’s Republic in the “Recovered Territories”

This article focuses on Polish sculpture after World War II as an instrument of Communist politics and it examines this subject in the scope of Roland Barthes’ theory. In Mythologies (1972), Barthes’ essays consider an advent of myths in modern culture and their sense embedded in popular art. The purpose of this paper is to adapt Barthes’ theory in order to analyse the political aspects of public monuments in Communist Poland. This group of official monuments created in the 1960s was dedicated to Slavic settlement and the first medieval sovereign Piast dynasty as the lords of the areas (later Germanised) that appeared around the 10th century. This historical fact was used by Communist propaganda. Because the Poles’ memory of their Soviet neighbours consisted of war crimes and the deportation of the Polish population and thus remained in Polish society, the ideology of this group of monuments became important symbols of the new Communist mythology: a desirable repertoire of motifs about Slavic friendship. But sometimes certain artists created subversive and oppositional meanings. The main section of this paper offers an analysis of the symbolic significance of monuments in this specific historical context.