Out of Place, Out of Time: Intellectual Disability in Late Socialist Polish Young Adult Literature Natalia Pamula Introduction Anna Zawadzka, a Polish literary scholar, writes that »communism was a revolutionary project intended to restructure social relations.« 1 However, a focus on late socialist-era Polish young adult literature (YAL) that discusses intellectual disability reveals the limits of the revolutionary potential of state socialism in Poland and, moreover, shows how representations of disability were employed in articulating social and spatial hierarchies. The young adult novels of the 1970s and 1980s I analyse in this article are not the first to utilise disability in order to discuss relationships between the state and its citizens and to formulate socialist visions of the future. They are, however, the first to depict intellectual disability and the ways in which it was integrated into literary discourses on the socialist failure to achieve even modernisation of the country. My article contributes to research exploring the complexities of late socialism and its literary representations, showing how literature negotiated the possibilities of reforming state socialism and envisioned socialist communities. YAL was a popular genre under state socialism in Poland and was generously supported by the state. The writers, for example Jadwiga Korczakowska, Krystyna Siesicka, Jerzy Szczygieł and Klementyna Sołonowicz-Olbrychska, were recipients of state awards and their novels —————— 1 Zawadzka, »Zanikanie komunizmu w PRL-u«, p. 287.