Idee i praktyka działania instytucjonalnego. Polska emigracja niepodległościowa jako "kustosz pamięci" oraz kreator "polskiej formy" (prolegomena do tematu)

Abstract

One may risk the claim that Poles are a nation in Europe that has been overwhelmingly affected over the last two centuries by its own emigration. Especially that which we define as soldiering political, and cultural, connected with independence movements, the idea of freedom, and consequently with pro-state and republican activity. This, in turn, means that focusing the attention of emigre elites on maintaining a sense of community not only outside the country, reinforcing the belief in the importance of self-identification, directing attention towards valorising the "Polish" model of nativeness, growing, as it were, from the field of private life, which in numerous periods of crises of the Republic was the equivalent of an "augmented" paternity - created, in the course of history, a specific "Polish form" based on the value of self-determination. Emigration is also the "custodian of memory" - it is the guardian of authentic, own experience, which is universalised through the repeatability of Polish history and Polish fate, through the supra-individual dimension of experiences. How, then, does the custodian of memory work in exile? Educated on the models of the Romantic Great Emigration and the state-forming model of culture, the ethos of which he came into contact with in his twenties, he assumes that institutions in exile and publishing houses, scientific research institutes, museums, and libraries are an extension of the Polish state, which he left in September 1939 or May 1945.