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Censored Intimacy: Zofia Kossak’s Crypto-Letters to Her Husband (1941–1943) in the Context of Private Discourse
Małgorzata Nowak
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5248-9130Artur Truszkowski
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6334-1828Abstract
The study deals with 53 letters and postcards sent by Zofia Kossak in 1941-1943 to her husband, Zygmunt Szatkowski, who was held in the German Oflag Murnau. Due to the political situation, the correspondence is ciphered, and Kossak assumes the identity of the imprisoned Zygmunt’s “brother” (Alfred Szatkowski). However, the mechanisms of linguistic identity concealment are easy to decipher in a biographical context, and the replacement of the lexemes “brother” and “husband” is natural in this context. The aim of the research, embedded in the methodology of privacy discourse, was to answer the questions: 1. To what extent does encryption of speech, in the context of external censorship and protective self-censorship, affect the privacy of the text? 2. Do these mechanisms block intimacy? The analysis showed that censorship did not significantly affect the subject matter of the communication, nor did the private content affect their intimacy – the correspondence contains few allusions and reminiscences, but always without erotic undertones.
Keywords:
private discourse, language intimacy, Oflag correspondence, speech functions, Zofia KossakDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.