The Europe of places and the Europe of spaces – study of an imagined map of the Old Continent in the Polish writing under the partitions in the period between uprisings

Abstract

The subject of this article is the problem of the imagined geography of the nineteenth century Europe in the Polish writing under the partitions in the period between uprisings. A distinction on the Europe of places and the Europe of spaces is the basic proposition of this paper.
The Polish authors focused on the specific places – towns, monuments, museum, souvenirs and nature strangeness when they described the Western. They imagined this part of Europe as the collection of places. The spaces were only the complement of this image. The Eastern and North parts of Europe were described differently. The authors rarer referred to particular places. While writing about Volyn, Podolia or Ukraine the Polish authors depicted rampant and vast steppes. Similarly, they depicted the forest landscapes while they writing about Polesia and Lithuania. They perceived the extreme North as rocky and glacial spaces.