While the Bukowskis represent the prominent modern gentry, the Buks and Lubonskis are later introduced to represent, respectively, the proletariat and nobility. Striking chords with the Solidarity movement occurring in the United States, this meeting is considered historic by news syndicates and broadcast to the US, Japan, Russia, and the rest of Western Europe. Together they hope to remedy certain agricultural problems and discuss the possibility of forming a farmers’ union in Poland. The minister of agriculture, Szymon Bukowski, attends a meeting at the home of Janko Buk, a leader of an informal but empowered group of farmers. Poland begins in 1980s communist Poland, in the city of Bukowo.
The book eventuated from Michener’s experience as a paid documentary filmographer, after which he received funding to travel anywhere in the world, and chose Poland. Written episodically, the book presents vignettes of familial struggles in times of unrest through Michener’s interpretive lens, which is informed by an extensive study of Polish history. It obliquely follows three families (the Lubonskis, the Bukowskis, and the Luks) living in the eponymous country across a period spanning the premodern era to 1981. Poland is a 1983 historical fiction novel by James Michener.
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