The interwar period is a source of unending inspiration for contemporary writers. This also concerns the political situation of the Second Republic. It’s enough to mention the novel King (Król) by Szczepan Twardoch from 2016, set against the backdrop of the antagonisms dividing Polish Socialist Party members and National Democrats.

The action of the book The Son of the Marshes (Syn Bagien) by Paweł Rzewuski also takes place in the Second Republic. This is the prose debut of this philosopher and historian who was earlier a non-fiction author. Besides The Son of the Marshe/i>, he has three titles to his credit. These are: Warsaw, City of Sin: Prostitution in the Second Polish Republic (Warszawa – miasto grzechu: Prostytucja w II RP), and The Sins of the ‘Paris of the North’: The Dark Life of Pre-War Warsaw (Grzechy »Paryża Północy«. Mroczne życie przedwojennej Warszawy).

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  Rzewuski’s first novel can be considered a success, though the multiplicity of threads in it meant that I had to re-read the ending several times to be clear about how the plot lines were settled. Nevertheless, it deserves attention because it is much more than a finely-written detective story.

The Son of the Marshes takes us to the spring of 1937. Here is Captain Maurycy Jakubowski, officer of the 2nd Department of the Main Command of the Polish Army, the famous “Dwójka” or “Defa”, the intelligence and counterintelligence of the Second Polish Republic. He is secretly sent by his superiors to the Polesie region, to Dawigródek, in order to solve the mystery of the disappearance of more than a dozen people. It is an area that constitutes a multicultural, borderland mosaic, and its informal lord is the provincial governor of Polesie, Wacław Kostek-Biernacki.

Unlike Jakubowski, this isn’t a fictional character. A grim legend has grown around this government official. He oversaw the isolation camp at Bereza Kartuska, where oppositionists – from communists to the right-wing – were imprisoned. Kostek-Biernacki was accused of having prisoners tortured at his initiative (the politician and writer, Stanisław Cat-Mackiewicz, even called him a “pathological sadist”). There were even opinions circulating that he practiced… Satanism. And not without reason.

Kostek-Biernacki was also a writer. His work includes the collection of stories published in 1931 with the telling title, The Devil the Winner (Diabeł zwycięzca). He was met with angry reactions from within the Catholic Church. “I am not surprised at the growing murmur of indignation, because from a religious and moral point of view, this book is really an exceptional scandal in the country. The author scorns God,” said Primate of Poland, Cardinal August Hlond, in assessing the book.

Returning to The Son of the Marshes, Jakubowski's mission can immediately be compared to Heart of Darkness. In Joseph Conrad's novel, the ships captain Marlow is tasked with finding the mad trader Kurtz in the African jungle. Rzewuski should be praised, however, for not playing cat and mouse with the reader, since he clearly points out this trope. Jakubowski is told by Major Stefan Mayer: "Biernacki is Kurtz, and you got the role of Marlow." But this is where the similarity between The Son of the Marshes and Heart of Darkness ends.

The darkness and mysteries that lie in wait for Jakubowski create an atmosphere that should be to the liking of fans of the writer Stefan Grabiński's horror stories, who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries and has been described as the "Polish Edgar Allan Poe." On the other hand, the social and natural realities presented in Rzewuski's novel correspond with the picturesque descriptions contained in a book by the master of Polish reporting, Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski, Polesie from 1934 (a quote from another of his books, Our Polish Jungles [Nasze polskie dżungle] , is the motto of Rzewuski's novel).

In The Son of the Marshes , the present is intertwined with the past and waking, with sleep. Jakubowski arrives at a place where rationalism is failing. It is a region threatened by the activity of Soviet saboteurs. They are hunted by agents of the Border Protection Corps, the special military formation created in 1924 serving in the eastern lands of the Polish state at the time, in order to counteract the danger from the USSR. But against the backdrop of this political situation, a battle is also playing out for the souls of the local, ethnically mixed populace (which include those presenting themselves as "local" Polesians), who in the marshes (a characteristic feature of Polesian nature) practice their own curious pagan rituals.

Rzewuski's novel therefore deals with the clash between civilizations. Of course, that's how the struggle between the Second Republic with Soviet influence should be seen. No less important is also the dimension of the clash of Polish culture, founded on Catholicism, with paganism, which survived in various forms among the Polesie people until the 20th century under the surface of the Orthodox Church.

However, this is already the past. Communism perished, the Soviet Union fell apart, and Poland’s society and borders have fundamentally changed. Between the Oder and the Bug there are no national tensions like those that troubled the Second Polish Republic. Some matters are still relevant though. They have to do with the alignment of Poland with the East, and the strengthening of Polish cultural identity in Catholicism.

– Filip Memches

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and jornalists

–Translated by Nicholas Siekierski

Paweł Rzewuski, Syn Bagien [The Son of the Marshes] , Wydawnictwo Literackie 2022