Juliusz Słowacki's Eastern Dirtscript. Volume 3 Studies and Interpretations
Studies and Interpretations presents a monographic approach to the notebooks from Juliusz Słowacki’s Eastern journey. Each of the contributors—members of the research project—saw in this extraordinary manuscript a different kind of document, one that offers new insights into the poet’s work and reveals the broad, multifaceted contexts of his travels to the East, including political dimensions.
The notebook became an invaluable source of information for the team. These contexts made it possible to recognize the manuscript as a romantic, open, and syncretic work—combining diverse ways of perceiving the world, multiple modes of expression, and tonalities.
Juliusz Słowacki’s travel notebook, discovered a few years ago in Moscow by Dr. habil. Henryk Głębocki (before 1939, the manuscript had been part of the Krasiński Library collection in Warsaw, inventory no. 5217), is a historical and cultural source of inestimable value. It contains the poet’s handwritten texts and drawings related to his journey to the East. Until now, it had never been fully published or studied; most of the sketches it contains were known only through references made by earlier editors. Since 1945, the manuscript had been considered lost in the Second World War.
The discovery of the autograph manuscript is a landmark event for Polish national heritage and holds profound scholarly significance for the study of Słowacki’s work. Contemporary literary-historical and textual-editorial knowledge allows the materials included in the notebook to be critically edited in a thoroughly academic manner. The aim of the edition is to examine the manuscript through an interdisciplinary lens—as a source of literary history, biography, and textual criticism, as well as broader historical research.
The rediscovery and critical edition of the manuscript also enabled a new interpretation of Słowacki’s journey to Greece and the Middle East—placing it in political, artistic, existential, and cultural contexts—and provided an opportunity 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 scholarly edition, including a full textual analysis of the rediscovered manuscript, complete with critical apparatus, commentary, and interpretative essays—along with a reconstruction of the notebook’s own history.
