Introduction

Early in her 1980 novel Nuns and Soldiers , Iris Murdoch describes a hero-in-waiting, Peter Szczepanski, the son of Polish refugees who settle in London just before the Second World War. Peter’s schoolmates, finding his last name unpronounceable, christen him the Count, a title that follows him into adulthood. Though his father pines to fight for Poland and rescue his homeland first from Nazis then Communists, Peter refuses to take part: ‘He did not want to hear of those centuries of misery, of “partitions” and betrayals ... He would not worship Kosciuszko and Mickiewicz or even remember who they were. Worst of all, while his mother was stubbornly refusing to learn English, he was stubbornly refusing to learn Polish’ (14). After the death of his parents, however, lineage (both biological and literary) overtakes the Count. He visits Poland, reads Polish journals, and rediscovers his roots, though he still avoids political activism. ‘Like his father he had, in his own way, interiorised Poland. He was his own Poland, suffering alone ... He would never die for Poland, as his father would have done ... But he could avoid any baseness which might demean that memory, and could cultivate a narrow moral stiffness with which to resist the world. Such was his honour’ (17–18). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Ancient history · Art · HERO · Homeland · Honour · Literature · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Worship · Central European Literary Studies · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies · Religious studies