Juliusz Słowacki's Eastern Dirtscript. Volume 2 Edition - Comments - Explanatory Notes
Edition – Commentary – Annotations, devoted to Juliusz Słowacki’s Eastern Notebook, includes a transliteration and transcription of the texts it contains, as well as commentary on the poet’s drawings and sketches, enabling their identification and interpretation as travel documents.
This volume also features a fascinating account of the notebook’s mysterious fate, reflecting the dramatic history of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Juliusz Słowacki’s travel notebook, discovered a few years ago in Moscow by Dr. habil. Henryk Głębocki (prior to 1939, the manuscript was held in the Krasiński Library in Warsaw, inv. no. 5217), is a historical and cultural source of inestimable value: it contains the poet’s handwritten notes and drawings from his journey to the East. Until now, the manuscript had never been fully published or studied; most of the drawings were previously known only through brief mentions by earlier editors. Since 1945, the manuscript was believed to have been destroyed during the Second World War.
The discovery of the autograph is a major event for Polish cultural heritage and holds great academic significance for research on Słowacki’s work. Contemporary knowledge in literary history and editorial studies makes it possible to prepare a comprehensive scholarly edition of the manuscripts and drawings included in the album. The aim of the edition is to examine the document using interdisciplinary methods—as a source for literary, historical, textual, and biographical research.
The recovery and scholarly edition of the manuscript has also made it possible to reinterpret Słowacki’s journey to Greece and the Middle East in political, artistic, existential, and social contexts, and to verify readings of texts whose autographs are preserved in the notebook. The result of the work, led by Professor Maria Kalinowska, is a three-volume edition comprising a critical transcription of the rediscovered manuscript (including a complete scholarly apparatus, commentary, and interpretive essays, as well as a reconstruction of the notebook’s history).
