Archiwum w Rapperswilu: Józef Mackiewicz i adresaci jego korespondencji

Abstract

The Polish Museum in Rapperswil stores the legacy of Józef Mackiewicz (1902-1985), catalogued and made available in 2006. It is a valuable documentation of the writer’s emigration connections. Mackiewicz maintained contacts with a large number of people and institutions from the Polish and Eastern European emigration circles. In general, I propose to study this kind of material with the help of two concepts that help to bring out the importance of specific emigration conditions for describing the biography and work of writers – above all, a radical change of the surrounding cultural environment and a change in reading circles: 1) Florian Zannicki’s concept of the social circle of man of knowledge, by means of which one can describe the changing “social circle” of a scientist or writer, a broadly understood “audience” at which creativity is “virtually” addressed, as well as the horizons of its perception; 2) Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic capital”. On the example of the correspondence between Józef Mackiewicz and film producer Józef Fryd (1905-1994) about (ultimately unrealized) plans to screen Mackiewicz’s novel The Colonel Myasoyedov Affair (1964) and especially several letters of 1971, I show how the discussion on the script highlights the changing perceptions of the audience caused by a different attitude to the past and present and a different medium. The discussion also outlines an awareness of the changing rules of the game related to the professional workshops of the writer and the filmmaker.