ABSTRACT
The major literary cycle of this period, Antoni Goubiew's series of novels about Bolesaw Chrobry, the first king of Poland, challenged official mores and was accordingly systematically denigrated in censorship reports. Polish scholars contributed substantially to what was effectively a communist state-sponsored international project in Hussite studies, the effect of which appears to have been grossly to exaggerate the scale of the phenomenon in late medieval Poland. Here the latter-day connotations of the pejorative mae pastewko, applied to post-Napoleonic solution of the Congress Kingdom of Poland, are teased out. Aesopian writing had been a significant feature of vernacular Polish literature since the late middle Ages but the experience of foreign occupation in the years 1795-1918 caused domestic Polish literature to elaborate the strategy to a much greater degree. Without entirely disputing these interpretations, others prioritized instead the novel's high literary genealogy the direct subordination of literature to political contingency presumably being uncomfortably close to practices under Socialist Realist doctrine.
