Robert von Dassanowsky, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

"To experience the taste of the Inexpressible:" Austrian Context and Intertext as Marxist Foil in Andrzej Kusniewicz's Krol obojga Sycylii (The King of the Two Sicilies)

Andrzej Kusniewicz's (1904-1993) novel, The King of the Two Sicilies (1970) belongs to a set of works by several Polish authors perpetuating the myth of the Kresy, the lost Eastern Polish territory that included the former Austro-Polish crownland of Galicia. While the subject of Stalinist truncation and Poland's relationship with the Austro-Hungarian Empire was still taboo during the seventies and the so-called "empty time" of the martial law period, these novels conjured the past through various literary games to suggest a "local truth" for a readership whose national and regional identity Tadeusz Komendant posits was "ravaged by Marxist ideology."

The novel offers a relationship with Austria and Mitteleuropa beyond the motifs analyzed by Lipinski, or the "literary ecumenism" Komendant finds in the author's non- or counter-Marxist transnationalism. While Kusniewicz suffered imprisonment at Mauthausen, he openly enjoyed his perceived cultural connections to Austria and even considered himself an "Urwiener" (a term Stanislaw Lec used for himself and Kusniewicz) in a 1985 interview. It is clear that the author located a portion of Polish historical identity in the Austrian past, and that in the period of a growing Solidarity movement, sought to reclaim this cultural imprint as one of the many that would contribute to a "true" Poland denied under communism.

Intertextual examination shows influences of Altenberg, Joseph Roth and Sacher-Masoch in the author's style and content as he unfolds the story of Emil R., a refined officer in the Imperial Sicilian Lancers stationed in a Hungarian garrison town and his masochistic desire for his domineering sister. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the mysterious death of a gypsy girl provide the framework for the novel's statement on the inescapability of cause and effect, and the irrevocability and indivisibility of the past. The work recalls Lernet-Holenia's 1942 Beide Sizilien in more than just title. Both works employ the Kingdom and its name-bearing Austro-Hungarian Lancers as an emblem for a lost, mythic Europe. Both works also escaped censorship through the "red herring" of a lurid central plot. Kusniewicz's saturation of the novel with nearly overwhelming references to "cultured culture" (Sylvain Lieberman's term for the compendium of artistic products in the novel) embedded in equally detailed social realia, allows him to refer the reader to art and philosophy unacceptable to the Marxist regime. The poetic detail which embellishes, mythologizes and skewers historical facts, stimulates emotional reactions and dares the reader to participate in Central European memory. The "clues" of cultural artifacts and the dualism that pervades the novel displays strong correspondences with Lernet-Holenia's banned cryptic-subversive 1941 novel, Mars im Widder, which in a sub-rosa manner suggests Austrian difference and a sophisticated Polish civilization. Kusniewicz's neo-Habsburg Myth ruptures the constraints of Socialist Realism under the guise of a condemnation of bourgeois decadence and the folly of the Great War. But like Lernet-Holenia's novels, Two Sicilies ultimately implies an "irrevocable" Mitteleuropa.