Wspomnienia, utwory poetyckie, eseje

Abstract

This book contains literary works by Stanisław Kryczyński (1911–1941), a Polish historian with Tatar roots. The source texts are published here for the first time. They were mostly produced by Kryczyński in the form of manuscripts and typescripts, contained in the collections of Warsaw University Library. Included in this edition are his Wspomnienia z poszukiwań naukowych [“Memoirs of Scientific Quests”], handwritten notes of his recollections, selected notes on literature, and works of poetry and poetic prose. The source texts are enriched with footnotes, principally consisting of summaries of the lives of figures in science and culture and of social and political activists in the interwar period, as well as information on significant historical events. The editorial notes also include, as far as possible, full bibliographic references to the literary and academic works cited by Kryczyński. Stanisław Kryczyński was born in Nowy Sącz. He passed his high school graduation examination in 1929, and in 1930 began studying history at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. In 1931 he moved to Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów (now Lviv; the city belonged to Poland until 1939). There, under Professor Stanisław Zakrzewski, he successfully defended his master’s dissertation in 1935, after which he moved to Warsaw to undertake Turkic studies. After completing his studies he worked at the Central Archives of Historical Records in Warsaw. Kryczyński was primarily a historian. From 1935 onwards he researched the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Tatars. His work of 1938 titled Tatarzy litewscy. Próba monografii historyczno-etnograficznej [“The Lithuanian Tatars. A historical and ethnographic monograph”] was the first work of significant size on that topic. Apart from this he also published several dozen other academic and popular works on subjects relating to the Tatars. The author’s interests included the rites of the Muslim people, relations between Christians and Muslims in the Polish Republic, the legal situation of the Tatars in historical Poland, and military topics relating to Polish adherents of Islam. Kryczyński was also a writer. He produced his first literary works very early in life. He published his first stories in 1925, and his first poetry in the school year of 1928/29. As a history student in Kraków, he began to write short stories which included descriptions of nature, folklore and facts taken from historical sources. He continued to produce literary work throughout the time of his studies, as well as during his later academic work in Warsaw and in wartime. According to Jan Tyszkiewicz, this writing was done mainly just for himself, for pleasure and self-fulfilment, which may explain the lack of any decision to publish most of his poetry and poetic prose. Several years prior to his death, Kryczyński organized his manuscripts and wrote his memoirs. The style of Kryczyński’s poetry and prose can be placed somewhere between that of the Polish poets of the 1918–1939 period, such as Józef Czechowicz, Jerzy Liebert and Czesław Miłosz, and the work of the Young Poland movement, primarily the naturalists. Kryczyński is part of the creative generation born around the year 1910. His work is characterized by the poetry of fluidity and of the “third word”, the Young Polish multiplicity of styles. Kryczyński’s poetry and prose extracts feature a wealth of diverse subjects. Interest in nature and its changeability, rural genre scenes, the sensuality of the everyday – all this is present in Kryczyński’s writing, along with, on the other hand, the dirty peasant cottages, musty rooms, the smell of sour cabbage in the school hallway, the tavern and drunken farmhands. This diversity, however, does not affect the cohesion of the world being presented, in whose richness the writer desires to find some kind of secret, perhaps even his own kind of mysticism. In places there can also be heard an echo of catastrophism, there appear undefined nightmare images, broken windows, smoke – maybe this is a record of the wartime Apocalypse being played out before the author’s eyes. Kryczyński’s memoirs have survived in two forms: handwritten notes, fragments of which probably date from before 1940, and a typescript which was clearly being prepared for publication. The latter bears the title Wspomnienia z poszukiwań naukowych [“Memoirs of Scientific Quests”], and gives the impression of being an “intellectual diary” (the author describes his scientific research and university studies, sharing his thoughts on the subjects of literature, history and music), whereas the handwritten part is, to a large degree, more of an “emotional diary” (recollections from early youth and adolescence, description of emotional and erotic initiations, drinking sessions with fellow students in Kraków, fights during street demonstrations, and the like). “Memoirs of Scientific Quests” can be considered Kryczyński’s finest literary work. Readers will undoubtedly be surprised by the erudition of the young author, still under the age of thirty – his intellectual maturity, wide reading, and brilliance in expressing opinions. A characteristic feature of the work is the synthetic nature of the thoughts and images presented in it. In a single paragraph, sentence or even word, Kryczyński is able to convey a thought so profound that many of us would take even several pages to express it. In a certain sense, one gets the impression that the writer was somehow racing against time, trying to express all of the thoughts which his mind was producing faster than his hand could write them down. The “Memoirs” cover an extremely rich range of subjects. If one were to attempt to identify a few dominant motifs, they would include history, Poland, Galicia, literature, a passion for research, and learning about the world. The final group of Kryczyński’s works contained in this book consists of historical essays. Of particular interest in this case is the lively narration, which is able to turn an academic treatise on long-gone times into an attractive and particularly engaging modern adventure story.