These recent Polish dystopian narratives are invariably set in small towns that were once on their way to being big cities: towns for which a sustained, capitalist future once seemed possible before the dreams of investors fizzled. Within such towns, these writers’ plots combine the conventions of sociology with those of sensationalist detective fiction, and sometimes also myth or legend. Their narrators uncover grisly crimes, but also pause to inspect these crimes within their larger social and cultural contexts. As they insist on something like empiricism, only to stage its dramatic failures, Springer, Orbitowski, and Bator put their characters, and by extension their readers, in the disempowered position of someone falling into a nightmare. Small towns, they insist, can be infinitely oppressive despite their obvious spatial finitude. The socioeconomic processes that make these places stagnant are no less frightening and real for being confined to a space so small that an unknowing traveler can pass through them almost without even noticing.

Filip Springer’s Archipelag Miast (An Archipelago of Cities, 2016) is a series of impressionistic vignettes about twenty provincial cities, each of which lost its status as a regional capital in the 1990s during a series of local government reforms. A great deal of money poured into these cities immediately after the fall of communism, but these investments stopped when the cities were administratively demoted. Their inhabitants now live amid ruins of public buildings begun but never completed. Small groups of artists haunt community cultural centers to which nobody comes anymore; local businessmen and shopkeepers hover around their clean, well-kept stalls but can rarely turn a profit. These cities have often existed since the Middle Ages, and Springer revels in the vertigo of reflecting on both their long histories and the possibility of their continued persistence in a perpetual state of slow, asymptotic decay. Describing these towns as an archipelago, Springer points out the similarities between them, not least of all their shared deepening difference from the more consistently traditional countryside around them, as well as from bigger cities such as Warsaw and Kraków, which emerged the victors in the struggle for foreign investment.

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Joanna Bator’s Ciemno, prawie noc (Dark, Nearly Nightfall; 2012) locates the origins of this sense of helplessness and stasis not only in the political and economic instability of late-communist Poland, but also in the earlier, collectively unprocessed traumas of World War II. Set in a fantastical, mythologized version of Wałbrzych, one of the former regional capitals also described by Springer, Bator’s narrative depicts the town as being all-the-more vulnerable to the upheavals of the late nineties because it never really came to terms with the crimes and betrayals that shook it fifty years prior. Bator is more committed to introspection than either Orbitowski or Springer, but her novel paradoxically also depicts self-scrutiny as nearly impossible within these largely undefined social conditions. For the town in which the novel is set, the community’s history is largely inscrutable except as nightmarish fantasies and dreams. Mired in its past, and left behind by the capitalism that appears to have entirely bypassed it, the small town is lost in a general sense of fear, superstition, and unpredictability.