Not Much Has Been Written about the Mountains… On the Subject of Mountain Studies

MJArticles and Studies, Elżbieta Dutka, nr 1 (9) 2025, Towards mountain studies

With the development of mountaineering and the increasing accessibility of the highest mountains, this second literature is emerging more and more from the closed circle of the community and appearing in wide public circulation. This is also fostered by the development of the media, disseminating accounts of high-mountain climbing. Stępień writes about mountain non-fiction, within which expedition books and reportages are popular, and about mountain personal document literature, represented by memoirs, autobiographies and biographies of outstanding mountaineers, often appearing in the form of inter-view-based books [10]:

 
This mountain documentary literature (expedition accounts and autobiographies) constitutes the most extensive sector of contemporary mountain literature in Poland and internationally. Of course, accounts of dramatic or tragic events in the mountains are in greatest demand, and bestsellers can in turn count on film adaptations. (Stępień 2021: 202).
The division into mountain literature and mountaineering literature highlighted by Stępień can be found in foreign studies. In English, it is well reflected in the play of sounds and meanings in the terms mountain literatureand mountaineering literature(Macfarlane 2019: xvi),absent in the Polish translation: literatura górskai literatura wspinaczkowa [mountain literature and mountaineering literature](Macfarlane 2022: 19).
 
The proposed delineations seem justified and have already been adopted by researchers. Mountaineering works in particular are increasingly becoming the subject of literary and cultural studies analyses. An outline of the history of Polish “Himalayan literature” in the perspective of its evolutionary genre transformations (from expedition diary to road novel) has been proposed by Ewa Grzęda (2022: 70–96). The researcher draws attention to the writing of Adam Karpinski, Jakub Bujak, Adam Skoczylas, Wojciech Kurtyka, and Marek Raganowicz, among others. Julie Rak’s monograph False Summit: Gender in Mountaineering Non Fiction analyses the accounts of expeditions to three eight-thousanders, particularly significant for Himalayan climbers (i.e. Annapurna, K2, and Mount Everest) focusing on the exclusions made therein (2021: 7). Margret Grabowicz, on the other hand, while referring to various accounts of expeditions to the highest peaks, writes about Himalayan mountaineering as “a sort of symptom of European modernity” (2021: 2).
 

[10]  Non-fiction and personal documentary literature are also identified by Przemysław Kaliszuk as points of reference. However, this researcher emphasises the borderline character of the Himalayan narratives, which are utilitarian-documentary texts, but at the same time “show characteristics inherent in literature”: “The Himalayan narratives are simultaneously expert (in terms of climbing and mountain knowledge) and amateur (in terms of literary competence). They expose this borderline positioning and belong fully neither to literature nor to applied or documentary writing” (Kaliszuk 2018: 60).

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