Listy Feliksa Wrotnowskiego do Eustachego Januszkiewicza z lat 1859–1968

Abstract

In his published letters, Wrotnowski raises the subject of emigrants’ everyday life. Due to rush, inability to meet or missing people in the space of a large city, Paris, letters replace daily conversations. Contemporary political events and social movements are left unsaid by Wrotnowski. Moreover, there are no comments about the events or phenomena happening outside the community of emigrants. Publishing issues, anguish of urgent work and finances dominate the correspondence. The sender describes his experience in editing Żywot Adolfa and preparing another edition of Adam Mickiewicz’s Parisian lectures, as well as his attempts to write a geography course book for Szkola Batignolska and to sell a matrix for printing so-called Chrzanowski’s map. Except for choosing to explore publishing issues, Wrotnowski gives economic details of the refugees’ life, often discusses his health and misery, meticulously makes notes of meetings with his countrymen, quotes their conversations. The language used by Wrotnowski is expressive Polish, frequently ornamented with Latin phrases and several Belorussian proverbs. Wrotnowski’s style makes most of the art of rhetoric, the author does not spare apostrophes addressed to Januszkiewicz, in order to highlight his situation he asks rhetorical questions or provocatively finishes his sentences. On the one hand, these are the letters written on business; on the other hand, they stay in the convention of confessions and personal stories. Twenty-one letters from Feliks Wrotnowski to Eustachy Januszkiewicz written during the years 1859–1868 is part of archives donated from Popiel book collection in Czaple Wielkie near Miechow to Biblioteka Jagiellonska by the agency of Witold Zachorowski in 1948.