History as a foreign country: Poland's Volhynia reckoning meets a global avant-garde in retreat

Two pieces of public writing circulated within hours of each other on 17 June 2026, and the distance between them is the story. At 08:54 UTC the Polish economics channel @ekonomat_pl posted a short video in which a speaker argues that Poles "glorify their history at the expense of others" and that the 1943–45 Volhynia massacre "did not come out of nowhere and we are not saints either." The clip, a 27-second excerpt framed as a question to the channel's audience, drew the kind of response that Polish historical-memory debates reliably draw: defensive on one side, exasperated on the other, and almost entirely uninterested in the literary question. By 16:36 UTC, the Indian magazine Scroll had published a long essay asking "What does the 'avant-garde' look like today?" and answered it by reading two new novels against each other — one in which a writer tries to disappear into her subject, and one in which a writer tries to perform the collapse of her own authority. The two stories share an author they will never meet. Both are about the limits of the available first-person.

Memory is a foreign country there as much as here. The Polish argument in the @ekonomat_pl video is not a fringe position. It is the working assumption of a serious strand of Polish historiography that has, over the last decade, moved the country's reckoning with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's ethnic cleansing of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia from a nationalist lament into something closer to a joint moral ledger. Poland's Institute of National Remembrance has spent years publishing and translating documents that name UPA units, locate mass graves, and place the killings in the context of pre-war Polish settlement policy and interwar Polish-Ukrainian conflict. The video's framing — that Polish self-mythologising leaves no room for complicity, and that Volhynia was a catastrophe with two histories — is the same one the Polish state has, sometimes reluctantly, internalised. The friction comes from the gap between what the historiographical mainstream accepts and what the street-level commentariat will tolerate being said aloud in a 27-second clip.

The novels surveyed by Scroll are not Polish and not historical, but they are working the same pressure point. The essay's thesis, which the reviewer lays out carefully, is that the contemporary novel is split between two competing answers to the avant-garde question. One answer, in the mode of the first book discussed, treats the avant-garde as a discipline of restraint: the writer who refuses the easy gesture, who stages her own disappearance, who trusts the reader to do work. The other answer, in the second book, treats the avant-garde as a discipline of exposure: the writer who performs the failure of her own authority, who shows the seams, who treats the novel as a stage on which its own conditions of production become the content. Neither writer is, in 2026, making the older claim that form alone can rupture the social world. Both are writing inside a more modest horizon — the question of what kind of first person can still be trusted, after decades of confessional exhaustion, autofiction burnout, and the slow collapse of the literary "I" as a vehicle of seriousness.

What connects the Polish memory argument to the novels is not aesthetic. It is the structural problem of who counts as a legitimate narrator. The @ekonomat_pl clip draws fire because it asks a Polish audience to accept a non-heroic first person — the Pole as participant in a regional moral catastrophe, not as its principal victim. The novels, separately, ask a literary audience to accept a non-heroic first person on the page — the writer who will not pretend to master her material, and the writer who will not pretend to be exempt from it. In each case the friction is the same. The Polish commentariat, judging by the brief excerpt, is being asked to read its own national story in a register it associates with surrender. The literary audience, Scroll suggests, is being asked to read the novel in a register that gives up the consolations of voice. Neither ask is comfortable; both are recognisably modern.

The Polish debate also illustrates why memory politics in Central Europe has become, in the last five years, a literature problem in disguise. The historiographical work on Volhynia has been, in many respects, exemplary — patient, multilingual, document-led, willing to incorporate Ukrainian and Jewish sources into a single chronology. What it has not solved is the problem of voice. Polish state institutions can publish a 1,200-page volume of UPA unit records and call it a reckoning; the commentariat will still treat any Polish speaker who says "we were not saints" in a video clip as a traitor. The constraint is not factual. It is expressive. The same constraint, mutatis mutandis, is what the Scroll reviewer identifies in the contemporary novel: the gap between what the documents will support and what the form will carry. The historian can produce the ledger. The novelist can produce the wreckage. Neither can produce, on demand, a first person the audience will accept as authoritative.

This is not a problem that resolves itself. The two answers the Scroll essay offers for the novel — restraint and exposure — are also the two answers the Polish debate has produced, in different vocabularies, for Volhynia. The restraint position is the one associated with the IPN's documentary tradition: publish the records, name the units, do not editorialize, let the reader do the moral work. The exposure position is the one associated with a younger generation of Polish and Ukrainian writers — Joanna Bator, Yurii Vynnychuk, and others less translated into English — who have insisted on writing Volhynia as a mutual wound, with Polish and Ukrainian perpetrators and victims named in the same sentence. The two positions are not equivalent. The restraint position produces a public that knows the facts and refuses the feeling. The exposure position produces a public that has the feeling and argues about the facts. The Polish commentariat's hostility to the @ekonomat_pl clip is, in this reading, a hostility to the exposure position — not to the underlying history, which is by now broadly conceded, but to the demand that a Pole on a video acknowledge complicity in the first person.

The forward view is unsentimental. On the Polish side, the institutional work on Volhynia will continue; the street-level debate will not converge on the institutional line, and it does not need to. The video-clip genre rewards compression, and compression flatters certainty. The exposure position will keep producing short, shareable artifacts that draw fire precisely because they are short. The restraint position will keep producing long, unglamorous documents that nobody shares. The two will continue to talk past each other, with the same casualty figures, the same named villages, the same disagreement about which one of them is the actual national project.

On the literary side, the Scroll essay is right to be cautious. The avant-garde, as a programme, is not coming back in any recognisable form; the institutional conditions that produced the historical avant-gardes are gone, and the novels surveyed are not pretending otherwise. What is coming back, in fragments, is the older question the avant-garde used to ask: what kind of first person does the present tense require? The two novels give different answers. The honest assessment is that the question is still open, and that the people best positioned to answer it are not necessarily the people with the most platform. They are the people — in Warsaw, in Kyiv, in Calcutta, in Lagos, in São Paulo — who have been forced, by the conditions of their own national arguments, to write in a register the metropolitan avant-garde has not yet noticed it needs.

The two stories on 17 June 2026 do not, in any literal sense, speak to each other. One is a 27-second Polish-language video; the other is a 4,000-word essay on two novels. The connection between them is structural, not editorial. Both are about the cost of speaking in the first person in 2026, and about the audiences that make that cost visible. The Polish audience will punish the speaker who says "we were not saints." The literary audience, Scroll suggests, is moving past the stage at which it punishes speakers for saying anything in the first place. The two audiences are not the same, but the friction is. Monexus reads them as one story, told in two registers, about the diminishing returns of the authoritative voice.

Desk note: Monexus read these two pieces together because they sit, structurally, on the same fault line — the contest over who may speak in the first person about a contested past, and on what terms. The wire services covered them separately; the Scroll essay in its own literary pages, the @ekonomat_pl video in its own Polish-language comment thread. The reading offered here is editorial, not synthetic reporting, and the source list reflects the wire provenance of the two pieces rather than a single integrated investigation.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/ekonomat_pl