Jerzy Stempowski

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Jerzy Stempowski

Jerzy Stempowski (born December 10, 1894 in Krakow , Austria-Hungary , † October 4, 1969 in Bern ) was a Polish literary critic , translator and writer. He is considered one of the most important Polish essayists of the 20th century. He also published under the pseudonym Paweł Hostowiec .

Life

Jerzy Stempowski comes from a country noble family and is the eldest son of the publicist, translator and socialist politician Stanisław Stempowski (1870-1952), who advocated the independence of Ukraine and 1920/21 minister in the government Symon Petlyura during the short-lived Ukrainian People's Republic was . The father translated Tolstoy , Chekhov and Saint-Exupéry into Polish. Nothing is known about his mother. Jerzy Stempowski grew up on an estate in Podolia on the right bank of the Dniester , the formerly Polish part of Ukraine, where the Stempowskis had lived since the 17th century. Different nationality groups lived together here, Polish , Russian , Ukrainian and Yiddish were spoken. The French language and culture were widespread among the educated middle class and the country nobility. In addition to Polish, Stempowski himself had knowledge of Greek, Latin, English, French, German, Russian and Ukrainian.

From 1911 to 1913 he studied philosophy and history at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, then medicine in Munich, philosophy and literary history in Geneva and Zurich and between 1916 and 1919 in Bern. In 1915 he worked in Zurich on a dissertation on ancient and Christian history of philosophy and obtained his doctorate after the end of the First World War . However, the writing has been lost. From 1917 he was an employee of the Turkish, from 1919 the Polish legation in Bern and worked as a correspondent for the Polish news agency in Paris, Geneva and Berlin. According to Timothy Snyder , it was during this time that he became familiar with the contemporary art movements of Italian Futurism and Dadaism . During the Polish-Soviet War 1919–1921, he first collected information for the Polish secret service as a traveling journalist (under the cover name “Rajmond Nyhölm”) in the Middle East and the Caucasus. Like his father, he became an active Freemason in the 1920s .

In 1926 he returned to Poland, joined the rather small circle of Warsaw intellectuals who - mostly from the old, cosmopolitan nobility and classically educated - advocated a liberal-democratic and socialist policy, and worked in the diplomatic service, among other things. He maintained relations with intellectuals and politicians from Ukraine and Turkey, among others, and tried to reach an understanding between Poles, Ukrainians and Jews, among other things by supporting the so-called Volhynia experiment of the Polish government. After a short time he left the civil service because he rejected the increasingly authoritarian regime under Józef Piłsudski ; from then on he mainly wrote theater reviews and texts for the feature section. His essay Pan Jowialski i jego spakobiercy (1931; "Mr. Jowialski and his heirs"), which discussed the plays of Aleksander Fredros on the surface , but actually criticized Piłsudski's policies, was influential . In it he stated that action alone cannot replace notions of order and that irrationalism conquers itself in the long run; he called the “great theater director” (hardly hidden who was meant) as “impatient and jealous” as a “tyrant”, since his irrational behavior creates fragility and instability.

Between 1935 and 1939 Stempowski taught at the State Theater Institute in Cracow.

Gravestone in the Powązki cemetery

After the German attack on Poland in World War II , he and Stanisław Vincenz fled across the border to Hungary in the Carpathian Mountains in September 1939 , where he hid. He wrote an essay about it, which is published in German translation in the volume Die Bibliothek der Schmuggler . In the spring of 1940 he came to Switzerland via Yugoslavia and Italy and settled there at the invitation of Hans Zbinden . He lived in Muri near Bern , from 1952 in Bern, and worked for Polish refugees until 1946. He wrote reports on the situation in occupied Poland for the Polish government- in- exile in London . After the end of the war he did not return to Poland.

From 1947, thanks to the support of Jerzy Giedroycs , he worked for the Polish exile magazine Kultura ; As one of the most important authors there, he wrote literary and cultural reviews and from 1954 to 1969 under the pseudonym Paweł Hostowiec the column Notatnik niespiesznego przechodnia (Notes of an uninvolved passer-by) . He was particularly involved in the political orientation of the magazine and, as in the pre-war period, represented a close connection with the democratic movements of the neighboring regions, especially in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, to build up a close connection with the democratic movements of the neighboring regions, especially in Lithuania, Belarus and the Ukraine, and the former Polish ones To question Ostpolitik. His texts for the features section of Radio Free Europe were collected and published in Poland in 1995.

Jerzy Stempowski lived alone and withdrawn in Bern until his death. There is a tombstone in the Powązki Cemetery in Warsaw. His estate now belongs to the Bern Burger Library (sub-depot in the Rapperswil Poland Museum ).

plant

Jerzy Stempowski's work includes essays, biographical stories, travel diaries and letters. Influenced by Marcel Proust and Simone Weil , he was one of the first writers to introduce the form of the essay into Polish literature; almost all later Polish essayists refer to him. He wrote in Polish and French.

A main theme of his texts is the crisis of European civilization, for example in the volume of essays Eseje dla Kassandry (1960; in English translation: Essays for Cassandra , 1990), in which he also talks about the fates of Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals and writers whom he shared between the had got to know both world wars, described. Together with the posthumously published volume Od Berdycowa do Rzymu (1971; “From Berdyczów to Rome”), this collection makes about a quarter of his short texts published in various places accessible. In 1998 Agnieszka Grzybkowska's translation of the Library of Smugglers , the diary of his trip through Germany and Austria in autumn 1945, and in 2006 the volume Von Land zu Land appeared in German. Essays of a Cosmopolitan . It contains three essayistic stories that were written between 1942 and 1964, in which Stempowski dealt with the cultural diversity as well as the ethnic and religious coexistence in eastern Central Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. The other two main themes of Stempowski were the values ​​and literature of antiquity and the way humans dealt with nature, which he melancholically described as - in Europe - largely reshaped by humans.

Stempowski coined the term closer or small home , a concept that has more to do with geographical space than with the course of political borders and nationalities. Stanisław Vinzenz, also a Polish writer in exile, referred to him as a cosmopolitan because, in his opinion, “real universalism [...] draws its nourishment from the regional”, and Jerzy Stempowski earned this name with his writing.

Jerzy Stempowski corresponded tirelessly with Polish and Ukrainian intellectuals and writers, he left thousands of letters. His correspondence from 1926 to 1953 with the writer Maria Dąbrowska , his father's partner, was published in three volumes in Poland in 2010. In a letter to Józef Wittlin he pointed out the profit that Polish writers in exile could derive from knowing about their “ancestors and predecessors in exile”. But his project to publish an anthology of exile literature, beginning with Ovid's exile , with which he wanted to promote “liberation from national patterns” and the rapprochement of writers to the countries in which they found exile, was never realized.

As a literary translator from Russian, he appeared with the Polish version of the novel Doctor Schiwago by Boris Pasternak (Doctor Żywago) , which was published in 1959 under his pseudonym Paweł Hostowiec by the Paris publishing house Instytut Literacki . In 1981 his Polish translation of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's stories Incident at the Kretschetowka train station (Zdarzenie na stacji Kreczetowka) was published.

In 2004 a Swiss publisher published a previously unpublished diary of his. Jerzy Stempowski wrote it in French under the title Notes pour une ombre (Notes for a shadow) . It consists of two parts, the first he wrote in Switzerland from August 28, 1940 to February 10, 1941, the second on a trip to the Dauphiné in July 1942. In it, he shed light on political developments in Europe and linked these episodes with it long letters to a beloved woman, Ludwika Rettingerowa, who died, to a prose text. She is the shadow that he made wander between the worlds of the living and the dead.

Awards

For his reflections on the nature and history of the Bernese Oberland La terre bernoise , written in French , which Virgil's Bucolica and Georgica took up and processed, he was awarded the canton of Bern's literary prize in 1954 .

Publications (selection)

  • From country to country. Essays of a Cosmopolitan. Edited by Basil Kerski, from the Polish by Agnieszka Grzybkowska. Friedenauer Presse, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-932109-49-X
  • Notes pour une ombre. Edition Noir sur Blanc, Montricher 2004, ISBN 978-2-88250-122-6 .
  • The Bernerland. Translated from the French and edited by Hilde Fieguth. Hans Huber Verlag, Bern 2001, ISBN 978-3-456-83855-7 .
  • Library of smugglers. Selection of essays, ed. by Basil Kerski , from Polish by Agnieszka Grzybkowska. Rospo Verlag, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-930325-16-0 .
  • The Poles in Dostoyevsky's novels (1931). Translation from the Polish Renate Schmidgall . In: Marek Klecel: Poland between East and West. Polish essays of the 20th century. An anthology. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. Main 1995, ISBN 978-3-518-40702-8 , pp. 97-120.

literature

  • Krzysztof Kozłowski : Stempowski, Jerzy. In: Tracy Chevalier (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Essay. Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago 1997, ISBN 1-884964-30-3 , p. 815 .
  • Timothy Snyder : Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. Yale University Press, New Haven CT 2007, ISBN 0-300-10670-X (study on the Polish artist Henryk Józewski with some mentions of Stempowski, see register p. 346 ).
  • Małgorzata Zemła: The Polish Essay and its Culture-Modeling Function (Jerzy Stempowski and Czesław Miłosz). Kubon & Sagner, Munich / Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86688-059-7 (also dissertation, University of Munich, 2006).
  • Łukasz Mikołajewski: From Center to Province. Changing Images of Europe in the Writings of Jerzy Stempowski. In: Mark Hewitson, Matthew D'Auria (eds.): Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957. Berghahn, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-85745-727-1 , pp. 183-197 (preview) .

documentary

  • Tomasz Kaminski (director): Jerzy Stempowski , Telewizja Polska, Krakau 1994 (42 minutes)

Web links

Commons : Jerzy Stempowski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See for more on this Andrzej Chojnowski: Stanisław Stempowski on his Participation in the Government of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In: Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Vol. 14, 1990, pp. 144-159.
  2. ↑ Timothy Snyder: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven CT 2007, p. Xix .
  3. ↑ Jerzy Stempowski describes how the French educational tradition is taken for granted in Eastern Europe in his essay Im Tal des Dniester. (1941) In: Library of Smugglers (1998), pp. 22-24; see Hans-Christian Trepte: Countries of Exile and Centers of Exile. Preferential considerations and cultural-historical backgrounds. In: Eva Behring et al. (Hrsg.): Basic concepts and authors of East Central European exile literature 1945–1989. Franz Steiner, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 978-3-515-08389-8 , pp. 67-136, here p. 76 f.
  4. ↑ a b Timothy Snyder: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven CT 2007, p. 27 .
  5. ^ A b Heinrich Riggenbach: Jerzy Stempowski. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland ., November 13, 2012.
  6. ↑ Timothy Snyder: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven CT 2007, p. 17 .
  7. ↑ Łukasz Mikołajewski: From Center to Province. Changing Images of Europe in the Writings of Jerzy Stempowski. In: Mark Hewitson, Matthew D'Auria (eds.): Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957. Berghahn, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-85745-727-1 , pp. 183–197, here p. 184.
  8. ↑ The Volhynia Experiment was a cross-border project in the years 1928–1938 which attempted “to bring the Ukrainian national movement into harmony with the Polish nation state”. In: Martin Aust : Poland and Russia in the dispute over Ukraine. Competing memories of the wars of the 17th century in the years 1934 to 2006 , Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2009, ISBN 978-3-447-05927-5 , pp. 167f. ( Book review for H-Soz-Kult by Elena Temper )
  9. ↑ Timothy Snyder: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven CT 2007, pp. 41 , 44 and 136.
  10. ↑ a b c d e Krzysztof Kozłowski: Stempowski, Jerzy. In: Tracy Chevalier (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Essay. Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago 1997, ISBN 1-884964-30-3 , p. 815 .
  11. ↑ Timothy Snyder: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven CT 2007, pp. 25-27.
  12. ^ Jan Zieliński: Jerzy Stempowski. In: Culture.pl , October 2010.
  13. ↑ Short biography Jerzy Stempowski , in: Marek Klecel: Poland between East and West. Polish essays of the 20th century. An anthology . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1995, p. 354 f.
  14. ^ Notes of a Casual Bystander. Jerzy Stempowski. In: Polish Book Institute .
  15. ↑ Timothy Snyder: Sketches from a Secret War: A Polish Artist's Mission to Liberate Soviet Ukraine. New Haven CT 2007, p. 250 .
  16. ^ Hans-Christian Trepte: Countries of exile and centers of exile. Preferential considerations and cultural-historical backgrounds. In: Eva Behring et al. (Hrsg.): Basic concepts and authors of East Central European exile literature 1945–1989. Pp. 67-136, here p. 98.
  17. ↑ Eva Behring et al. (Ed.): Basic concepts and authors of East Central European exile literature 1945–1989. Bibliographic notes: Jerzy Stempowski , p. 693 .
  18. ↑ Łukasz Mikołajewski: From Center to Province. Changing Images of Europe in the Writings of Jerzy Stempowski. In: Mark Hewitson, Matthew D'Auria (eds.): Europe in Crisis: Intellectuals and the European Idea, 1917–1957. Berghahn, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-85745-727-1 , pp. 183–197, here p. 183.
  19. ↑ Felietony dla Radia Wolna Europa . Stempowski, Jerzy., Opracował Jerzy Timoszewicz. In: Warszawa, Twój Styl, 1995, 171 p. European Bibliography on Eastern European Studies (EBSEES)
  20. ↑ Jerzy Stempowski in the catalog of the Burgerbibliothek Bern .
  21. ^ Zvi Y. Gitelman (Ed.): The Emergence of Modern Jewish Politics: Bundism and Zionism in Eastern Europe. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh 2003, ISBN 978-0-8229-4188-0 , p. 120.
  22. ^ Philip Eppelsheim: Cosmopolis. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 15, 2007, No. 239, p. 36.
  23. ↑ Renata Makarska: The room and its texts. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-59302-8 , p. 23.
  24. ^ Maria Dąbrowska, Jerzy Stempowski: Listy 1926–1953. 3 volumes. Biblioteka Więzi, Warsaw 2010 (review by Joanna Szczęsna: Listy, Dąbrowska, Maria; Stempowski, Jerzy. In: Gazeta Wyborcza , November 22, 2010).
  25. ↑ Quoted in: Basic Concepts and Authors of East Central European Exile Literature 1945–1989 , p. 25.
  26. ^ Eva Behring: Formation of values ​​and canonization in encyclopedic literature and in the genres that consider literature. In this. ua (Ed.): Basic terms and authors of East Central European exile literature 1945–1989 , pp. 531–545, here p. 540 .
  27. ↑ Notes pour une ombre. Jerzy Stempowski. Les Éditions Noir sur Blanc (publisher's text).
personal data
SURNAME Stempowski, Jerzy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stempowski, Georges; Hostowiec, Paweł (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish literary critic, essayist
DATE OF BIRTH December 10, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Krakow
DATE OF DEATH 4th October 1969
Place of death Bern