Wit Tarnawski and "Wiadomości"

Abstract

The article discusses the writing and literary critical activity of Wit Tarnawski in the London magazine „Wiadomości”. Tarnawski was a collaborator of the weekly in the years 1947-1980 and published there his prose works, translations into Polish, essays, columns, reviews, aphorisms, and poems. In the circle of „Wiadomości” readers, he was known primarily as an expert and researcher of the works of Joseph Conrad, a literary critic and a prose writer. Throughout all the years of cooperation with the magazine, he remained faithful to his vision of literature and the understanding of the role of the critic as the writer's partner, whose task is to "talk to the author". He owed such an understanding of art and reality to his fascination with Conrad's work and the personalistic way of thinking about the world and man. In literary works, he sought, above all, a description of the fate of an individual and only later its participation in the transformations of history. He understood the task of the writer as striving to capture the complex truth about man in the ethical dimension and, most often, in the perspective of tragedy. Tarnawski played the most important role in „Wiadomości” as an expert and promoter of Joseph Conrad's work. It was thanks to him that he made people aware of the connections between Conrad's work and Polish literary tradition, history, and culture, as well as maintaining Conrad's topicality in the ideological discourse of the emigration for independence in times of moral and aesthetic dislocation.