The experience of a mental return to the homeland as a dimension of an emigrant's identity : Jerzy Stempowski's Ukraine

The paper concerns the nostalgic and phantasmic returns of Jerzy Stempowski to Ukraine, recorded in his essays and letters from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. They contain the concept of literature as prosthetic art - supplementing the lost direct contact with the homeland, on the one hand it refers to it corresponds to the romantic tradition, on the other, it heralds the art of the virtual age. The author emphasizes an extremely vivid, sensual approach to both direct descriptions of Stempowski’s Ukrainian journeys and imaginative, fantasmatic returns after many years.