Wschodniogalicyjskie Podkarpacie Juliusza Turczyńskiego – portret „z niedalekiej przeszłości”

Abstract

The paper presents the images of rural life in Subcarpathian regions of the 19th century Eastern Galicia, recorded in sociocultural, quasi‑chronicle, or memoir prose of Juliusz Turczyński (1833–1913). This gymnasium professor and a well‑known writer connected with Stanisławów achieved his greatest success as the author of novellas and short stories. His socio‑cultural, ethnographic and landscape sketches dedicated toHutsul Land, which record the traditional life ofthe region, disappearing because of modern trends, belong to the most important literary testimonies of life and mentality of the 19th century Carpathian Highlanders. His less popular, but equally interesting dramatized sociological studies, illustrate the situation of Eastern Galician village in the serfdom era that has recently passed. Turczyński’s prose, which is rather conventional and schematic in terms of artistic creation, combines the objective features of a document – the testimony of the mechanisms determining and destroying the life of a simple man – with the elements of didactic morality and parabolic vison of a lively character of the people, prone to fall, but also to convert.