Nineteenth-century women’s egodocuments in the historian’s research workshop. (On the margins of the NPDH project: “Memoirs and letters of Polish authors from the Western Krai (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) 1795–1918”)

The paper is devoted to the research on the nineteenth-century women’s diaries, memoirs, and epistolography, carried out in the years 2013– 2017 as part of the international project of the National Program for the Development of Humanities: “Memoirs and letters of Polish authors from the Western Krai (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) in the years 1795–1918”. It discusses the status and role of the nineteenth-century women’s egodocuments in contemporary humanities. The study refers to the importance of autobiographical reflection and cultural perspective, and the major point of reference are selected examples of collections of manuscript letters, memoirs, and diaries of Polish women authors from the so-called Taken Lands1 (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) in the nineteenth century, and those women who were associated with these areas only for a period of time, as well as those who only wrote about the Taken Lands. This article focuses primarily 1 Polish historiography commonly refers to the Western Krai as the Taken/Stolen Lands or the Russian Seizure. The most western part of this area is often referred to as Kresy or Eastern Borderlands. Lidia Michalska-Bracha, Nineteenth-century women’s egodocuments...


Research assumptions
The study of the nineteenth-century women's egodocuments is not only part of a broader biographical research perspective, but also refers to no less important primary source-related issues 2 . The research potential of the nineteenth-century memoir literature and women's epistolography cannot be underestimated in this type of research. Therefore, it seems crucial to draw attention to two main issues that shape the further study plan: (1) the importance of personal sources in the study of women's history, with reference to autobiographical reflection in biographical research 3 ; (2) the status of women's egodocuments in contemporary humanities and the practice and perspectives of this kind of research 4 .
The shape of my research proposal was determined mainly by the cultural perspective that perceives various forms of nineteenth-century writings (journals, memoirs, diaries, letters) as texts of culture, which defines the interpretative area of my further observations. They occupy a special place in the contemporary reflection on the nineteenth-century women's biographies, expanding the area of historical inquiry with inspirations from other disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and psychology 5 . I consider this interdisciplinary aspect a very important cognitive category. It allows to conceptualize the subject of research on egodocuments, to categorize them, and to attempt to understand the world presented by women (which acts as a form  społecznych", Przegląd Socjologii Jakościowej, vol. 9, no. 3, 2013, 6-10. 4 Waldemar Chorążyczewski, Arvydas Pacevičius, Stanisław Roszak (eds.), Egodokumenty. Tradycje historiograficzne i perspektywy badawcze, (Toruń: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, 2015).

S T U D I A I M AT E R I A ŁY
C z a s o p i s m o N a u ko w e I n s t y t u t u S t u d i ó w K o b i e c y c h of cognizable culture) and how it translates into the historian-researcher's language (who acts as the learning culture), to refer here to a very interesting research concept of Jan Pomorski 6 . In this approach, the subject of scientific inquiry lies in the search for and understanding of what exists at the intersection of the two spaces: the "learning culture, and the cognizable culture". This research is also a common ground for a meeting of those representatives of many humanities and social disciplines who consider reflection on autobiographical narrative as an integral part of their own scientific research.

Nineteenth-century women's egodocuments -research practice
The point of reference for these considerations are the nineteenth-century women's egodocuments inventoried as part of the international project of the National Program for the Development of Humanities (NPDH), titled: "Memoirs and letters of Polish authors from the Western Krai (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine) 1795-1918" 7 . The final result of the grant, which was implemented in 2013-2017 at the Jan Kochanowski University in Kielce under the supervision of Prof. Wiesław Caban, an inventory of nearly 5,300 manuscript and printed letters and diaries, including 793 hand-written and 1,534 printed diaries, and 2,486 hand-written and 476 printed letters. In terms of the number of the sources obtained and the scope of the source query, the results are certainly impressive. However, they do not exhaust the extensive research problem and the resulting need to document the written Polish national heritage outside the country, mainly in the East. The queries made by a team of researchers in more than forty Polish and foreign archives and libraries ( 1795-1918", Respectus Philologicus, no. 33, 2018 documents stored in the East which require further cataloguing. A further result was the introduction into the scientific circulation of a number of valuable, often unique, memoirs and epistolographic sources written by the Poles from the Taken Lands in the nineteenth century. The final outcome of the work is not only an Internet database of the inventoried manuscript and printed memoirs and letters of Polish authors from the Lands Taken in the nineteenth century (https://nprh.ujk.edu.pl/), but also the publication of eight volumes of critically edited memoirs and letter collections 8 , as well as a three-volume catalogue of primary sources inventoried so far as part of the discussed NPDH project 9 .
An integral part of the inventoried collection are the nineteenth-century legacies of Polish women authors from the Lands Taken, and those whose fate was only partly associated with the area. Interestingly, of the total number of approximately 3,279 inventoried manuscript memoirs and letter collections, women's legacies are not so few, as close to 10%, i.e. 312 bibliographic entries (159 for memoirs and 153 for letters). Women's printed memoirs and letters were not included in this calculation. However, the index itself to both volumes of the catalogues includes 1,500 names of authors of memoirs and letters and their addressees. The largest collection of women's memoirs and letter collections inventoried in the course of the NPDH project comes, apart from national collections, from Lithuanian and Ukrainian archives and libraries. The queries included several archives and libraries, but the most interesting examples of women's memoirs and letters were found in the the Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius, the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius, the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Kiev, the Vernadsky National Library in Kiev, and the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv. When it comes to national archival resources, the legacy of women authors from or associated with the Taken Lands was revealed in many of the archives and libraries queried, but the number of these sources varies greatly 10 .
For the most part, the authors of the letters and memories inventoried in the NPDH project were representatives of the landed gentry, socially engaged women, active in cultural and social life; women fighting to preserve Polishness in the era of partitioned Poland, engaged in charitable and educational activities; women active in the January Uprising, exiled deep into Russia, emigrants, activists of women's societies, emancipants, writers, and, finally, women curious of the world, who left valuable travel diaries, and those who became excellent observers of everyday life in Kresy. Of the entire collection, I will now draw attention to only selected examples of women's egodocuments of unquestionable cognitive value.
The primary importance in the research on women's egodocuments should certainly be attributed to the documents in the Volyn Museum collection (operating since 1893 at the Volyn Church and Archaeological Society), currently stored in the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Kiev. This extensive collection, numbering nearly a thousand archival units within a wide chronological range, from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries, contains unique diaries, memoirs, and journals of Polish women from the Eastern Borderlands 11 . They include Zofia Łepkowska's journal from 1891-1907, in which she records the daily life of the nineteenth-century landed gentry from Volyn and Podolia with the smallest detail, and mentions well-known families of the era: Chełmiński, Grocholski, Lubomirski, Michałowski, Plater, Sobański, and Wodzicki 12 . The journal is being prepared for critical edition by members of the research team (Maria Domańska-Nogajczyk, Tomasz Wójcik).
Another source of unquestionable value which researchers of women's manuscript legacies will find in the same collection of the Volyn Museum are journals of Adela Kieniewicz (1870Kieniewicz ( -1935, daughter of Antoni Jodko-Narkiewicz (1843-1892), art expert, owner of the Wolica estate in the Volyn Governorate, wife of Hieronim Kieniewicz of the Rawicz coat of arms , social activist and landowner, born in Dereszewicze, Polesie. The journals draw attention not only with their volume (38 volumes of double-sided handwriting) and the vivid description of the life of Polish landowners in Kresy at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also with their rather extensive chronological range, covering the years 1888-1915, when they were written by the author. Her autobiographical account is not only a record of the life of the landed gentry seen from the Kieniewicz estates in Dereszewicze and Bryniów, but also from her trips to Western Europe, the perspective of Paris, Vienna, Dresden, and Berlin 13 . In addition to the collection of the Volyn Museum, the Kiev archives also possess noteworthy Polish personal and family archives, including: Branicki, Hański, Giżycki, Godebski, Grocholski, Borkowski, Zamoyski, Tarnowski, Sobański, and others 14 .
Among the manuscript resources of the Wróblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in Vilnius one finds an interesting Of a great cognitive value is the legacy of Helena Romańska neé Kordzikowska (1845Kordzikowska ( -1924, participant of the 1863 uprising, writer and educational activist, stored in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives in Vilnius, in the Vilnius Society of Friends of Science fond. The legacy refers to the January Uprising in Lithuania, particularly to the events taking place in the Kovno province at that time. Helena spent most of her life in the Urwisko grange near Krakinów. She was a daughter of Józef Kordzikowski and Rachela née Dąbrowski, owners of the Rady estate, in the Poniewierski county. She was exiled to Siberia for her participation in the January Uprising, then, after returning to Lithuania, she was involved in secret teaching. In her legacy, she left source extracts, accounts of deportees and participants of the January Uprising, which she had been carefully collecting and writing down for years, as well as memoirs  245-250. 21 LSHAV, f. 1135inv. 20, vol. 397, 398, 737;Malwina Mazan-Jakubowska, "Rodzina Medarda Kończy na zesłaniu w Wielkim Ustiugu (1841-1843 w świetle korespondencji i relacji pamiętnikarskich", Przegląd Wschodnioeuropejski, vol. 5, 2014, no. 1, 61-74. 22 LSHAV, f. 1135Grażyna Czerniak, Jolanta Kowalik, "Anna Oskierczanka -ziemianka kresowa w świetle swojego pamiętnika", Meritum, no. 5, 2015, 63-73. 23 LSHAV, f. 1135inv. 8, vol. 27 Particularly noteworthy is the legacy of Tekla Bołsunowska and Róża Sobańska née Łubieńska from the Kiev collections (Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine and the Vernadsky National Library) 25 . The cognitive value of Sobańska and Bołsunowska's correspondence (the latter came from Podolia) cannot be overestimated when it comes to the research on charity for people deported to Siberia in the forties and fifties of the nineteenth century. The ladies founded the Care Committee whose activities covered the areas of Podolia and Volyn. While Sobańska and her charitable activity for the exiled is quite well-known in the literature thanks to the research of Prof. Wiktoria Śliwowska, Bołsunowska's activity has not been studied in depth yet, and Maria Domańska-Nogajczyk and Tomasz Wójcik are now trying to fill this research gap. They have pointed out the importance of the correspondence with requests for help (a collection of about 100 letters) addressed to Bołsunowska in 1849-1858 26 .

Final remarks
The results of the research conducted since 2013 by an international team of researchers under the discussed NPDH project again raise the question of the status and place of the nineteenth-century women's diaries, memoirs, journals, and letters in the historian's research workshop. Women's egodocuments are a "testimony of privacy" of their authors, evidence of their state of consciousness, their attitude towards the external world and the elements constructing it; they testify to the numerous aspects of intimate, everyday, social, and political life, including gender equality, the burning issue of their times. Egodocuments reveal the subjective world of the authors' values, their perception, life choices and motivations, also those that made them decide to write down personal feelings and experiences. Finally, from the author's perspective, they bring closer the images of other characters inscribed in the autobiographical story and reveal a lot about interpersonal relationships. They refer us not only to the context of historical reality, but also allow us to "read" the reality contemporary to the authors. This is an undeniably important feature of egodocuments. This specific "two--layered" narrative, defined in a natural way by the historical context of the times described and the context of the "present" in which the autobiographical record was produced, broadens the field of observation and allows to raise a number of new research questions. We can attribute multiple functions to woman's egodocuments, which, despite the authors' highly individualized optics of self-perception and perception of the outside world, reveal a lot about the social context of their autobiographical narrative, which is certainly the asset of all memoir sources. The women's heritage inventoried under the NPDH project has a high cognitive value. Interestingly, and which requires special emphasis, they do not constitute a closed collection as further queries are required and more documentation work must be carried out in Polish, but mainly in foreign archives and libraries that store written Polish heritage.