Pod herbem Amora, amoku i amfory. Szalony i dramatyczny powrót Gałczyńskiego do kraju

Abstract

The study is an attempt at the interpretation of the least known period in the biography of K.I. Gałczyński, which still awaits detailed research, i.e. the period from the end of World War II to the 22nd of March 1946, when the poet disembarked from the ship “Ragne” and wrote in the memorial book of the Harbour in Gdynia: “Gałczyński is back and alive!”. The poet’s return to Poland took nearly eleven months of wandering along the roads and highways of Germany, Holland, Belgium, and southern France, from where he tried to get to Italy. He roamed in alcohol-induced trance, intoxicated by love, offering ill-considered marriage proposals. Yet trance and intoxication were not the only attributes of this journey, as they were accompanied by an emotional craze and eclipse of the mind that resulted from this Saint Vitus’ dance, as well as the despair that resulted from the inability to solve the dilemma: whether to return to the country where the instruments of ideological slavery had begun to emerge, or not. Gałczyński arrived in Krakow, at the apartment occupied by his legally wed wife Natalia, whom he had married in the Orthodox church in Warsaw in 1931, and his daughter Kira. He left in Germany his second wife, whom he married fourteen years later in a catholic church in Blomberg, and his son Konstanty who was born on the 22nd of January 1946.