That Which is Invisible: Lublin’s Underground, Nooks and Alleys in Radek Rak’s The Empty Sky

Abstract

The article analyzes Radek Rak’s novel Puste niebo (The Empty Sky, 2016) through the lens of Lublin’s urban topography and contemporary geopoetics. Rak depicts the city as a multidimensional space—historical, dreamlike, and fantastic at once. Underground passages, alleys, and hidden corners play a central role as both an alternative communication system and an initiatory realm populated by monsters and human fears. The narrative employs archetypes (the initiate, the mentor, the trickster, the femme fatale, the Shadow), which are deconstructed by embedding them within the logic of the antihero. Intertextual references to world literature (Dickens, Schulz, Carroll, Lewis), myth, and popular culture (Hitchcock, horror conventions) enrich the novel’s structure. Lublin emerges as a palimpsest, a heterotopia, and a liminal space—between the real and the fantastic, the sacred and the profane, memory and oblivion. Puste niebo is thus both a fantastic vision of the city and a literary reflection on its cultural identity. It is concluded that in Radek Rak’s Empty Sky, Lublin functions as a cultural crucible, a liminal city where historical, religious, and cultural layers intersect. The city embodies both coexistence and tension: between Catholics and Jews, past and modernity, myth and deconstruction. Underground passages, alleys, and hidden corners operate as initiatory spaces for the protagonist, Tołpi, while archetypal figures — mentor, trickster, femme fatale — are deconstructed and recontextualized within the logic of the anti-hero. Intertextual references to world literature, myths, and popular culture enrich the narrative and highlight Lublin as a palimpsest, a symbolic and multi-dimensional space. The novel explores how memory, identity, and urban topography intertwine, showing that cities can function as both real and imagined spaces. Rak presents a model for literary reflection on cultural and spatial complexity, demonstrating how myth, history, and imagination merge in contemporary fiction. Lublin emerges as a living palimpsest, where history, myth, and imagination converge in literature.