The Polish language itself underwent a major change (Pisarek, 1999). From the schizophrenic situation before 1989, when a gap between the language used in the private and the public spheres was enormous (Glowinski, 1990), Polish was plunged straight into the situation when the two registers merged with a vengeance. To prevent the side effects of such an explosion of 'private languages' and 'free for all', in 1999 the Polish parliament passed a law protecting the appropriate use of Polish in the public sphere.6 What the law did not tackle was the overwhelming influence of English on the Polish language in private and public spheres both in a written and a spoken form (Kwiecinski, 1998). This influence is conspicuous not only in translated literature from English, but also in literary texts written in Polish.

It would be difficult to prove whether, as Evan-Zohar claims, all these changes have led to the 'vacuum' and the dominant, or even central position of translated literature within the Polish literary system. Perhaps this is true of popular literature, because before 1989 popular literature in the Western understanding of the term was actively discouraged by the authorities and constituted a marginal phenomenon in the official sphere (Kloskowska, 2005). The sudden influx of inexpensive paperbacks available in large numbers in Polish hypermarkets did certainly mean that they began to occupy a central position within this genre. In general, however, the urge to reject the old models as an intentional action was a matter of the formation of small new literary groupings such as a literary group BRuLion. In the mid-1990s there was also a brief period of wide-ranging media discussion about the demise of what was called 'traditional Polish cultural paradigms' and an emergence of new attitudes and styles in creative writing (Janion, 1996), including women's writing and gay literature. However, all these symptoms do not constitute sufficient evidence to suggest that the transformations in the Polish polysystem caused a radical and permanent change in literary taste. Foreign models have 'infiltrated' some aspects of the Polish literary system, but it is too early to state that they changed the prevailing taste.

What has certainly changed is the mechanism by which books are marketed and sold. In the absence of modern marketing tools and the absence of the very word 'marketing' in the Polish vocabulary, books in pre-1989 Poland were neither promoted nor advertised. Bestsellers were created by word of mouth, or by the simple fact that books that were in demand were not available in a sufficient numbers. A queue in front of a bookshop used to be as common as a queue in front of any other shop. Now, the bestsellers are manufactured in the same way they are manufactured in other countries and the Polish bestseller lists are not different from similar lists elsewhere. Although Poland is perceived as a deeply Catholic country, The Da Vinci Code dominates the bestseller lists in Poland in the same way that it does anywhere else.

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