literary criticism
De Poniatowska and Poniatowski
The Mexican author, Cervantes Prize winner in 2013, novels her life and that of her ancestor, the last king of Poland
The novelistic career of
Elena Poniatowski has been marked by two great contradictions.
the polish lover
| author | Elena Poniatowski | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Editorial | Seix Barral | ||
| pages | 892 | ||
| Precio | 24,90 euros |
The first of these lies in the fact that he has always regretted that he was not recognized for the same literary quality as the writers of the Latin American ‘boom’ when his narrative proposal (the testimonial novel, which is a fusion of social realism with documented journalism) was It presents itself as the antithesis and a popular alternative to the stylistic elitism and the rich fantasy that characterized those writers, despite being contemporary with them. His coincidences with García Márquez were more ideological and journalistic than literary. The second contradiction lies in the great attention that, on the one hand, he pays in his own work to his noble origins linked to European history, as well as to the exiles caused by social and political revolutions in it, that is, what we can call “her aristocratic vindication”, and a populist leftism that led her to support, in the 2006 Mexican presidential elections, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the current president of that country. It is precisely this contradiction that he expresses, and at the same time tries to overcome,’
the polish lover‘, the last of his novels, which alternates episodes from his own biography with those of his ancestor Stanislaw August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland. The historical character that the writer takes on for this enormous 892-page novel is, without a doubt, suggestive. She lived for sixty-six years, from 1732 to 1798, and was, in her youth, the lover of Catherine the Great. But that love story must not have brought him any benefit, neither sentimentally nor politically, but rather it was acquiring, with the passage of time and with the historical circumstances, some tragic and fatal overtones. In the Empress of Russia, as in Frederick II of Prussia and Maria Teresa of Austria, he would find the worst enemies, during a reign that began in 1764 and ended in 1795 with the partition of Poland and the suppression of the name of that country in the maps. The very relationship that both had maintained did not serve to avoid that national tragedy, but to add to the figure of King Poniatowski the legend of ‘traitor’ to that of a betrayed lover and that of a catastrophic ruler.
‘Socially scienced’
In his novel,
Elena Poniatowski he embarks in a determined and even passionate way on an apology for the unfortunate monarch. The author resolves this aforementioned contradiction in the face of a dethronement that would not be easy to lament from a stereotypical leftist perspective by presenting her ancestor as a pioneer of modern constitutionalism and the struggle for social conquests. It would be that primary concern for his people and for his independence that would have brought him into dramatic conflict with his former lover, who demanded of him a submissive role that he did not want to accept. It is in this image of a ‘socially aware’ man that the writer seeks a point of identification that justifies the fusion that occurs in the book between her own biography, which begins on the eve of the most convulsive moments of the 20th century, and the character from the 18th century, who would respond to a man of the Enlightenment who wrote a daily personal diary in French about his ups and downs in government, his dreams, projects and political thoughts. Diary that, after her death and burial in the church of Santa Catalina, in Saint Petersburg, would be confiscated by order of the Emperor of Russia Paul I. It is following the false identification between the dethroned king and the writer, that the latter alternates with his own autobiographical experiences, among them those of the Second World War, which he spent with his grandparents in France until undertaking the journey in 1943 that would take her to Mexico, setting sail on the ‘Marqués de Comillas’ from the port of Bilbao in company, according to his account, of many exiles from the Spanish Civil War, which had ended in 1939. In those pages dedicated to his own life there is no lack of sentimental experiences, from the first love that he lived precisely on that ship at the age of ten, until her marriage to the Mexican astronomer Guillermo Haro, who died in 1988 and to whom she dedicated her novel ‘La piel del cielo’, published in 2001. Despite its contradictions and failed parallels, ‘
the polish lover‘ is a work that has a certain interest due to its testimonial, genealogical and testamentary character.