The interwar period from 1919 to 1939 is an unusually rich and varied period in literary output. The readership and prominence of reportage, journalism and the essay grew during this period. The most interesting phenomenon of the era, however, was the political novel of the first years of independence. The past war, the threat of revolution, the far-from-ideal reality in the young state provoked description and evaluation. Wyspianski's dream of a Poland that was a joy and a longing for the soul remained a mirage, and so did Żeromski's vision of glass houses. The myths of Deed and Rebirth, Power and Money, Class Struggle required revision. The mood of disappointment and bitterness, the feeling of helplessness, were superbly conveyed in the novels of Andrzej Strug, Stefan Żeromski, Zofia Nałkowska, Juliusz Kaden from 1918-25, alluding both to the then fashionable Expressionism and using the formulas of realist or psychological prose, with the addition of lyricism or grotesque, satire. "Stefan Żeromski's Przedwiośnie [The Spring to Come] (1925) is the crowning achievement of this current of literature struggling with the present, in line with the motto that the Homeland is the first duty ...

The exhibition outlines a panorama of the prose of the 'Polish interwar period', in which the political novel also comes to the fore because of the place of its presentation. This is the Museum of Andrzej Strug - author of Ludzi podziemnych [Underground People] (1908), prose writer, publicist, PPS activist, officer in the Polish Legions, and finally senator and freemason in the independent Polish Republic. A writer with romantic ideals, committed to the "Polish cause" wholeheartedly, who nevertheless gradually lost his illusions, like his entire generation and... the "Marek Świda generation" (1925). It was within these walls that Strug wrote his trilogy The Yellow Cross (1923-33).