The interwar period was an important time in the history of Polish documentary writing. The poetics of the genre was formed at the turn of the 1920s and 30s. At that time, there was a debate about the cognitive and aesthetic values of documentary writing. A variety of thematic forms quickly emerged, including works about foreign countries. This subgenre had two main variants: the „exotic documentary” (or „exotic-adventure”) and „sociopolitical documentary”. The present article examines a selection of texts representing both the variants and written by: Ferdynand Goetel, Zbigniew Uniłowski, Aleksander Janta-Połczyński, Ksawery Pruszyński, Melchior Wańkowicz, Antoni Słonimski, Zygmunt Nowakowski and others.
The sample of Polish version of this article is available here: https://tekstualia.pl/files/29646ea7/sobczak_pawel-od_islandii_po_brazylie.pdf