A transcript of the public discussion that took place on May 27, 2023 at Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw

A Skovorodian towards Shevchenko’s and Gogol’s Man 

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an ‘iron curtain’ has descended across the continent”. Do those famous words spoken by Winston Churchill in 1946, which for years confirmed the simple dichotomy of Europe, still hold true? Did the breakthrough of 1989 really change the semantics of the concepts of East and West? In recent years, the metaphor of the “new Iron Curtain” has been reappearing more and more often. The still present inferiority complex of the periphery, populist governments based on nationalist and anti-European slogans, and, finally, the war in Ukraine and mass migrations strongly influence the creation of new divisions, but also provide an opportunity to create a new balance of power and a community far from right-wing populism and, at the same time, devoid of Western-centric hegemony. Today, the question of new European solidarity also becomes a question about the possibility of a new world and the values on which it is to be based”. A record of a debate held at the Powszechny Theatre as part of the Forum of the Future of Culture 2023.