5 Historical Twists and Turns in the Polish Canon of Children’s Literature Anna Maria Czernow and Dorota Michulka This chapter discusses the problematic situation of the Polish canon of children’s literature from a historical and educational perspective. It iden- tifes three important and violent turning points in the history of Polish culture: the regaining of independence in 1918, the proclamation of the People’s Republic of Poland in 1945 and the end of communism in 1989. By comparing three Polish canons – from the interwar period, from the communist time and the present – the frst part of the chapter highlights how these canons affected the development of the Polish literary system. The second part emphasizes the changes in Polish school education after 1999 which raised questions about the attitude towards the historical past and the future on the one hand, and the aims of canonical children’s liter- ature on the other. In her refection on Polish fantasy literature from the interwar period (1918–1939), Joanna Papuzińska uses the metaphor of the Sunken Kingdom, a shadow imaginary space where all forgotten literary texts stay undis- turbed by today’s readers or scholars (2008: 11). On the other hand, when discussing children’s books which played a signifcant role in the develop- ment of Polish national literature but are no longer read or published, Polish scholars have often named those “late masterpieces.” The main paradox of Polish children’s literature is that its historical development can be seen as a process of withdrawing national literary texts from circulation while most texts translated from foreign languages remain untouched. Scholars’ regrets that the vast majority of old children’s books have fallen into oblivion are usually expressed with reference to the interwar period, and the icon of these regrets is Bronisława Ostrowska’s Bohaterski miś (The Heroic Teddy Bear), published in 1919. 1 However, one should point out that most liter- ary productions for children in the Polish People’s Republic fell victim to the same mechanism which this book encountered: they were no longer published, disseminated, made available or present in broadly understood academic research. They “sank into depths beyond the reach of present day users of culture” (Papuzińska 2008: 25). 2 Therefore, it seems to be worth- while universalizing Papuzińska’s metaphor of the Sunken Kingdom and relating it to the entire history of changes in the twentieth-century canon of Polish literature for the young reader.