The Polish-Jewish novelist, poet and translator Józef Wittlin (1896–1976), author of the classic Sól ziemi (1935, English Salt of the Earth, 1939), lived in Lwów (until 1918 Lemberg, today Lviv) for ...about 20 years until 1922. Thereafter, whether in Poland or from 1939 in exile first in France, then the United States, he cherished his memories of this architecturally distinguished and multiethnic city, publishing his memoir Mόj Lwów My Lwów with an exile press in New York in 1946 (English translation 2016). The article draws on archival documents from Poland, the United Kingdom and the United States and other published sources to give a history of the book’s conception and reception, above all in the exiled Polish diaspora, and makes a case for Mόj Lwów’s enduring significance as a work of imaginative reconstruction written in exile.
Artykuł omawia współpracę Tymona Terleckiego i kolejnych redaktorów „Wiadomości”. Podstawę analizy stanowi korespondencja Terleckiego z redaktorami tygodnika oraz publikowane w nim teksty: eseje, ...szkice publicystyczne, rozprawy o kulturze, recenzje z przedstawień teatralnych. Wykazano, że Terlecki angażował się również w akcje, których celem było wsparcie finansowe czasopisma. Pokazano także, że po intensywnej współpracy z Mieczysławem Grydzewskim, z uwagi na liczne obciążenia zawodowe, w okresie redakcji Michała Chmielowca, Terlecki zmniejszył swoją aktywność pisarską, a redakcję Stefanii Kossowskiej wspierał z powodów osobistych, łączącej ich przyjaźni.
Tymon Terlecki was born on 10 August 1905 in Przemyśl, Galicia, in the part of Austro-Hungarian Empire gained by the partition of Poland, as a subject of Emperor Franz Josef I. Since the autumn of ...1911 he attended a six-grade Popular School. In the September of 1914, after the outbreak of the First World War, his family was evacuated to Neufeld in Moravia. In 1915, Terlecki moved to Lvov and studied at two Lvov middle schools. In the autumn of 1924, he began studying Polish philology at King John Casimir University in Lvov, but having contracted tuberculosis had to take two breaks from his course of study and get treatment in Zakopane. In 1930, he started publishing literary criticism and theatre reviews, mostly in Słowo Polskie daily; he also actively participated in the artistic and literary life of Lvov and cooperated with the radio. In June 1932, Terlecki was awarded a Phd diploma for his dissertation on the poet and writer Ryszard Berwiński (1819–1879), written under the tutelage of Professor Juliusz Kleiner. In 1932–1934, Terlecki lived in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne and College de France onscholarship from the French government. He travelled to Spain and visited England, Belgium and the Netherlands. On his return to Poland, Terlecki lived in Warsaw where he lectured drama History at the State Institute for dramatic Art (Państwowy Instytut Sztuki Teatralnej), and since 1936 edited two periodicals: Teatr, and the exemplary theatrological quarterly Scena Polska. He also collaborated with Tygodnik Ilustrowany weekly, Pion and Życie Sztuki. In July 1939, Terlecki went for treatment to France and upon the outbreak of the Second World War joined the Polish Army. In the military camp in Coëtquidan, Brittany, he became editor of Polska Walcząca weekly, the official organ of the Polish Armed Forces in the West, which he then edited in Paris and, after evacuation to England, in London from June 1940 until the end of 1948. In London, he became an initiator of the literary, artistic and scientific life of Polish emigrants, and organised unions of Polish artists and writers abroad. In 1964, Terlecki was invited to teach Polish Literature classesas a visiting lecturer at the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, and after two semesters accepted a permanent teaching position as professor of Polish literature, which he held until 1972. After retirement, he taught at seminars and lectured as a senior visiting professor at the State University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (1972–1977). during the Chicago period, Terlecki participated in numerous conferences, published articles on Polish literature and the theatre, as well as on ethnical and national diversity; he visited many educational and research centres, giving lectures in Jerusalem, detroit, New York City, Washington dC, Montreal, Buffalo, New Orleans, and Los Angeles. Terlecki constantly observed the scientific, literary and artistic life in his home country, which he was not allowed to visit; he received guests from Poland and promoted them in Great Britain and the United States. In the summer of 1972, Terlecki went to Paris for a three-month scholarship of the American Council for Learned Societies to do research on Wyspiański and Craig. In 1973 he was finally granted US citizenship; until then, as a stateless person, he had had only a British travel document. In June 1978, he returned to London and continued his activities in the scientific and literary life of the Polish emigrants. He resumed teaching at the Polish University Abroad. At the turn of 1981 and 1982, he toured the US and Canada, giving lectures on literature and theatre at universities and academic institutions (among which were Ann Arbor, Harvard, and Columbia University). In 1983, he published in Boston an English monograph, Stanisław Wyspiański, in Twayne’s World Authors Series.
Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) fut probablement l’un des plus grands dramaturges français, par l’importance, la diversité et le rayonnement international de ses œuvres. Pourtant, les pièces de cet ...auteur éblouissant, qui avait été un infatigable homme de théâtre et l’ami des plus grands comédiens de son temps, notamment Sarah Bernhardt, ont disparu de la scène après le choc du second conflit mondial. Ses comédies de mœurs et ses vaudevilles électriques semblaient d’une autre époque, tout comme ses drames historiques, dont l’esprit ne paraissait plus en phase avec le nouveau langage dramatique, plus inquiet et dépouillé. Que restait-il alors de cette œuvre naguère si prisée ? Une adaptation pour l’opéra (Tosca) et un succès populaire (Madame Sans-Gêne). Un soupçon écrasant s’est alors abattu sur l’ancien prince du théâtre. Personnalité hors du commun, véritablement spectaculaire, tout à la fois auteur dramatique, metteur en scène et figure médiatique usant avec talent des images et de l’émotivité de ses contemporains, cet adepte du spiritisme fut aussi un collectionneur et un ardent polémiste. Comment s’étonner dès lors qu’il soit devenu un personnage, une créature en grande partie imaginaire ? Après sa mort en 1908, l’œuvre de Sardou a poursuivi sa route sur d’autres scènes et à travers d’autres arts. L’imagination du dramaturge avait inventé des figures, des histoires, des drames qui continuaient de hanter le théâtre et qui se montraient une magnifique source d’inspiration pour de nouveaux créateurs, librettistes, musiciens et cinéastes. Ce livre, conçu à l’occasion du centenaire de sa disparition, prétend redessiner les contours d’un royaume spectaculaire évanoui.
Based nearly exclusively on Tymon Terlecki’s home archive (letters, notebooks, press releases and other forgotten texts), the article is an attempt to reconstruct the literary evenings organized by ...the Polish Society of Academics in Chicago in 1964—1978, initiated by Terlecki. Thanks to the initiative and organizational effort of the Polish Society of Academics, the Polish community could meet various artists of multiple talents. During the inauguration of the academic year, writers and academics delivered speeches, among them: Danuta Mostwin and Florian Śmieja. Poetic evenings were held for Beata Obertyńska or Czesław Miłosz. From among the writers residing in America, the following presented their works during the literary evenings: Rόża Nowotarska, Bohdan Pawłowicz and Zbigniew Chałko, whereas Zofia Romanowiczowa came from Europe especially to participate. Among national artists presenting their literary works one could mention: Zbigniew Bieńkowski and Małgorzata Hillar, Jan Jόzef Szczepański, Artur Międzyrzecki and Julia Hartwig (winners of the scholarship offered by the University of Iowa) as well as Maria Dłuska and Tymoteusz Karpowicz. Special attention was given to theatre artists: Elżbieta Dziewońska-Krzemieńska, Mieczysława Ćwiklińska, Elżbieta Barszczewska and Łukasz Łukaszewicz. The successof these meetings was largely due to the active participation of the members of the Legionof Young Polish Women, the sponsors of the Chair of Polish Literature at the University of Chicago.
When Czesław Miłosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, Tadeusz Konwicki was invited to make a screen version of The Issa Valley, a novel based on the laureate’s childhood spent on the ...banks of the Niewiaża river. One of Poland’s best-known novelists, whose fictional narratives have often been likened to film scripts, Konwicki also had a number of striking authorial films to his credit. Yet, although his novels often address the private hinterland of his childhood spent in the province of Wilno, he had never touched on a “Lithuanian” theme in his films. It was no small task. Acclaimed as a literary masterpiece, ThThThe Issa Valley had been variously defined as the amalgam of a Manichean treatise and a conventional Eastern borderlands novel, a living tribal fairy-tale from the crossroads of anthropology, sociology, history and memoir-writing, and an epiclyrical memory-book related to the great works of Joyce, Musil and Proust. It has also been seen as a literary exemplification of Apocatastasis, when “each object has a double duration. Both in time and when time will be no more”. For the screen-play Konwicki selected crucial episodes of existential drama that disrupt the calendar of rural life. Whereas his authorial films draw on oneiric collage and associational montage, it is chiefly painting that informs the aesthetics of his Issa Valley, seamlessly blending realistic scènes de genre in the Dutch manner, the lighting effects of Le Nain and La Tour, hunting scenes, dreamscapes in the romantic vein, naturalist sequences of woodland glades etc. Konwicki furthermore breaks up the filmic sequence with recitations of Miłosz’s poems, and fleeting intrusions of history and the present time, thus generating several realities or time scales, framed by work on the film-set, and punctuated by modern melodies. The result is a great clash of chiaroscuro, as the luminous shots of rural Arcadia are violently juxtaposed with the deep night of a two-dimensional, urban America, which serves as backdrop to the recitation, both heightening and refuting fairy-tale reality.
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