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Abstract
The article sketches "a personal genealogy" of Wanda Wasilewska (1905-1964): a writer, a devoted communist, and head of Zwiazek Patriotów Polskich (Union of Polish Patriots) in the USSR during World War II. Referring to Michel Foucault's lectures on "revolution which becomes an existential project," the author frames Wasilewska neither as a communist icon nor as a symbol of national betrayal, but instead as a living human being, a social actor, a person strongly embedded in the historical and geopolitical context of her era. The author reconstructs the process of shaping the communist identity in prewar Poland, points to the moments of transgressing subsequent boundaries-gender, national, and class-and uncovers a gradual exploring of the limits of the communist transgression by the protagonist.
Keywords: boundaries, communism, gender, homeland, personal genealogy, revolution, transgression
Personal Genealogy
In an autobiographical account entitled "O moich ksiqzkach" (About my books), which was an introduction to her collected works, published in Moscow in 1955, the prominent Polish female communist leader and writer Wanda Wasilewska confessed: "My childhood home was a good school for me: it was far from bourgeois self-contentment and ideals; a home in which everyone was preoccupied with social issues ... ; the atmosphere of my childhood home, where social issues - and not personal ones-were always in the center, had a huge influence on my later life. It was obvious that one had to be interested in what was happening around us, one should take an active part in life."1 Wasilewska (1905-1964) was a writer, a devoted communist who during World War II headed Zwiqzek Patriotów Polskich (Union of Polish Patriots) in the USSR-a communist political organization closely associated with Stalin-and who eventually became a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. Reflecting on her childhood, she declared that "the struggle" had always been at the center of her life: the kind of struggle that becomes the point of one's life and consumes the entire individual. For Wasilewska, the close connection between one's political beliefs and one's life choices was self-evident: political life was bound to trespass on every aspect of personal life, devouring and subjugating the "private" self. At the same time, personal experience became an impulse for taking up political action, initiating change, or...