Sarmatyzm, czyli tradycja wynaleziona

ENIn this article Niedźwiedź examines Sarmatism as a national “invented tradition”. Seen from this perspective, Sarmatism does not represent the culture of pre-partition Poland’s gentry but a nineteenth and twentieth-century narrative about Poland’s past. Thus Sarmatism is defined in terms of a nineteenth-century Polish identity discourse transposed into the past. Niedźwiedź discusses five main characteristics: Polonocentrism, totality, homogenization, orientalism and exclusivity. In his conclusion he remarks on the legacy of Sarmatism and the fundamental role it plays today in identity discourses of the Polish political left and right. Keywords: national identity, invented tradition, Sarmatism, early modern Polish literature, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.