Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The article outlines the creative profile of Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, reconstructed on the basis of his diaries and letters, especially his as-yet-unpublished mutual correspondence with Jerzy Stempowski. The correspondence between Stempowski and Herling-Grudziński, which serves as a generational bridge in the tradition of thinking about the writer’s duties to history, offers many interesting details about the sociology of literary life—not only in exile but also at home. It contains numerous far-sighted and brilliant assessments of 20th-century social and cultural phenomena, often expressed in the form of aphoristic statements. The letters also provide insightful and accurate diagnoses of the situation of European countries and Poland in the post-Yalta reality of the 1940s and 1950s, the political and cultural situation in pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Russia, as well as precise observations defining the place and possibilities of the émigré writer, free from the social obligations of those writers who, in the country, must forgo expressing independent opinions publicly in the name of redefined national or political duties.