Marian Kukiel’s oeuvre is one of the milestones of Polish military historiography. Together with Wacław Tokarz, Marian Kukiel was a co-founder of this discipline. His monumental work on the War of 1812 is an important contribution to European Napoleonic studies. The researcher’s qualities included versatility and diligence. He was a soldier, politician and promoter of…
There are actually few composers active in the 20th century who can be referred to as ‘contemporary classics’. Witold Lutosławski certainly belongs to this narrow group. An artist who, confronting the key issues of the 20th-century art of composition, created pieces that impress with their balance of intellect and emotion, and are simultaneously extremely open…
He was an implacable anti-communist, stubborn and consistent in his views. Ethnic, national, and class perspectives were relegated to the background when it came to individual freedom. That is why he had the greatest empathy for the defeated whom the world forgot after the Second World War. by Piotr Abryszeński ‘I am in favour…
The most famous of [the Warsaw Robinson Crusoes] is Władysław Szpilman. But there were many more of them – Jews, Poles, and Russians. by Michał Studniarek The uprising that had broken out on 1 August in Warsaw finally ended in defeat on 2 October 1944. According to the capitulation agreement, the insurgents were taken…
In the 18th-century history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, there are few events that have been as fraught with myths, stereotypes and even misrepresentations, as the Tarnogród Confederation (1715–1717) and, in particular, the Silent Sejm, which lasted only a single day: 1 February 1717. by Prof. Adam Perłakowski A certain pattern of thought, repeated for…
When Czesław Milosz arrived in Warsaw in 1981, fresh from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, one of the visits he made, was to a private apartment, to meet with the people responsible for bringing his poems to Polish readers. From 1951, when Milosz had refused to return to Stalinist Poland, a ban had been…
