Osuszanie historii. Błoto i nowoczesność.

The point of departure for this article is Eastern Europe and its association with mud, which fascinated writers of the enlightenment period. They pictured the region as a wilderness inhabited by fugitives, smugglers and miscreants – an image that went hand in hand with their “civilising” mission of harnessing both nature and the population to productive work. In this narrative mud figures as a hindrance to progress. It is remarkable that mud reappears in the same role in modern Polish cultural texts such as Stefan Żeromski’s Przedwiośnie [The Spring to Come] or Maria Dąbrowska’s Noce i dnie [Nights and Days]. The authors’ goal is to construct an alternative narrative of the modernising projects developed in relation to Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century until the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]