What is Poland? It is a country between the East and the West, where Europe starts to draw to an end, a border country where the East and the West soften into each other. A country of weakened forms... None of the great movements of European culture has ever really penetrated Poland, not the Renaissance, not the wars of religion, not the French Revolution, not the Industrial Revolution. Of all these phenomenon Poland has felt no more than a muted echo[....] So these plains, open to every wind, had long been the scene of a great compromise between Form and its Degradation. Everything was effaced, disintegrated...

[...] Against the Polish sky, against the sky of a paling, waning Europe, one can see why so much paper coming from the West falls to the ground, into the mud, onto the sand, so that little boys grazing their cows can make the usual use of it.

Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament