Polish Peasant in Poland: Peasants in the Narratives of Polish Nation-Building

This chapter concerns the phenomenon of “people’s history,” namely a historical perspective that purposely focuses on the experiences and narratives of the “common folk,” which in recent years is becoming increasingly fashionable in popular historical writings in Poland. The chapter investigates people’s history of Poland insofar as it relates to the history of Polish peasants. The aim being to present how peasants begin to be included into historical narratives of Polish nation-building, from which they were previously excluded. Using the established–outsider framework of Elias and Scotson, the chapter analyses the practice of history-writing as a the established’s attempt to retain power and as a possible tool for emancipation. The main question of the chapter is: Are the new publications on the people’s history of Poland a retaliation from the outsiders, an emancipatory outsider backlash against the centuries of erasure from the national culture and history? The author overviews the peasants–nobility figuration, especially the process of “othering” the Polish peasants, thus excluding them from nation-building narratives. Finally, the author describes the people’s history of Poland as a genre of historical fiction, analyses the term “people” as a socio-discursive figure, and examines the two-way relationship between historical fiction and politics.