Ród Niedziałkowskich. Miasto, regionalizm i polityka

Abstract

The article focuses on the Niedziałkowski family who originated from small nobility who had lived in Volhynia and later, at the turn of the 19th and the 20th century, settled in Vilnius where they became members of the wealthy intelligentsia. The paper presents the lives of: Karol Antoni Niedziałkowski, the bishop of Lutsk and Zhytomyr, his step-brother Konrad Bolesław Niedziałkowski, Deputy President of Vilnius in the years 1907–1914 and his children: Wanda Niedziałkowska-Dobaczewska, a poet, writer, and publicist, Mieczysław Niedziałkowski, a politician in the Second Republic of Poland, and their younger brothers and sisters. Their lives are the background for the presentation of Vilnius in the first four decades of the 20th century, at several breakthrough moments. The first of them was the intensification of Polish education, self-learning groups and secret associations of young people after 1907 and the importance of the heritage of Adam Mickiewicz for the Polish independence movement. The second one was regionalism as the main trend in the period between wars, which, with its epigonic images of the “city of miracles” and the regressive ethos of fighting the tsar’s regime, failed to recognise the importance of nationalist movements. The text presents the conflict between Czesław Miłosz and regionalism and the dramatic escape of Wanda Niedziałkowska-Dobaczewska from the city, as she was arrested by Lithuanian authorities in 1940.