Czapski nieznany

This chapter presents fragments of works by several authors and institutions on little known territories of Polish intellectual and historical legacy. Sources pertaining to the St. Petersburg itinerary of Józef Czapski during the last decade of the Romanoff reign discloses unwittingly the significant participation of the Poles in the upper rungs of the Empire administration. This was a state, which at the time of Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin found itself upon the threshold of a constitutional-liberal evolution toppled after his assassination in Kiev in 1911. The same hope returned after the fall of the tsarist system in February 1917, i.e. during the period of the first (and for almost a century the only) constitutional-democratic government of Prime Ministers Lvov and Kerensky. Ultimately, it was finally broken after power was seized by the Bolshevik faction and Lenin. Young Czapski was in the middle – close to the political and creative elites of this disintegrating world together with its hopes and catastrophic finale. The St. Petersburg itinerary is the work of Tatiana Kosinova, a historian from St. Petersburg associated with the ”Memorial” milieu. The translation and edition of the itinerary were conducted by Halyna Dubyk, a Ukrainian historian from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw (workshop of Prof. Piotr Mitzner). Reading the Czapski diaries is the editorial and research project of the Institute for Documentation and Studies on Polish Literature, and the effect of years-long meticulous work carried out by Janusz Nowak, one of the most eminent Polish archivists and custodian of the Józef and Maria Czapski Archive from the moment of its transference to the National Museum in Cracow from Maisons-Laffitte, as well as the efforts of the outstanding young researcher and editor Mikołaj Nowak–Rogoziński. The Czapski diary, known as: Wyrwane strony – a splendid and definitive edition issued by ”Zeszyty Literackie” – consists of the titular ”pages torn from the diary”, authorised and edited by Czapski himself. A fragment of the Russian diary from 1942 is part of the diaries published for the first time and prepared by Mikołaj Nowak-Rogoziński upon the basis of Czapski’s manuscripts and typescripts, albeit unfortunately already unauthorised by the author. We owe the publication of the rough, source version of three Occupation-era stories by Ludwik Hering to work performed by the Institute for Documentation and Studies on Polish Literature, D