"Pomniki folkloru", czyli anegdoty studenckie czasów PRL-u w internecie

Abstract

“MONUMENTS OF FOLKLORE”: STUDENTS’ ANECDOTES FROM THE TIMES OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF POLAND ON THE INTERNET

This article aims at determining to what extent the internet may facilitateresearching past forms of folklore. The source material used herein is students’ anecdotes from the times of the People’s Republic of Poland, which have been confronted with contemporary anecdotes. The analysis of the available texts (both published and unpublished, obtained in field research) has enabled the author to formulate the following thesis: the Internet facilitatesgetting to know not only anecdotes themselves but also their various aspects and contexts in which they appear. On the basis of the analysis of comments available on forums and discussions about the past anecdotes, one can draw interesting conclusions:Firstly, the compositionof old anecdotes reminds one of contemporary texts as it is based on the typical conflict between “one of us” (a student) and the stranger (a non-student), with the former usually winning over the latter. Secondly, the difference concerns mostly the representations of everyday life, and especially the political context, which in turn is related to the emergence of the group of “regime heroes”, occasionally present also in contemporary anecdotes (the militiaman, the lecturer from a military academy). Another difference is also the absence of the theme of the fight against the dominant political system in contemporary students’ anecdotes. Therefore, older students’ anecdotes had both ludic and therapeutic, or compensatory, functions typical of political folklore contesting the political order. The above conclusions taking into consideration the data available on the Internet subvert Mikhail D. Alekseevsky’s theory that the Web only stores “monuments of folklore.”