The intimacy of Stanisław Vincenz in a textological and editorial perspective

Abstract

Considering the legacy of Stanisław Vincenz as the literature of a personal document leads to isolating three groups of texts. While the memoires of his friends are journalistic or literary in character, the writer’s correspondence reveals a private dialogue. The third group is made up of Dialogues with the Soviets, an interview conducted by John Marbach and the notes of his second wife, Irena Vincenz, published in “Regiony” magazine as Conversations with Stanisław Vincenz. Vincenz’s texts are marked by restraint, which results from both the poetics of letters, lectures and soliloquies, as well as the practice of dictating the majority of his epistolary statements to his wife. This mediation changed the communicative situation: it introduced a witness, listener and co-author of the letter (a second subject). The most complete reflection of the writer’s personality, registering a wide range of emotions, are also the double-subjective notes of Irena Vincenz and the mixed-genre drafts in which the stream of workshop materials blends with diary notes. The study of Vincenz’s expressed intimacy requires the recognition of subjectivity in individual texts, their situational contexts and material representation, and, above all, the reservoir of written records. The analysis of messages and the reconstruction of writing practices and authorial habits allows for accurate description of the history of a particular artifact: such way of conduct is identical to the assumptions of the anthropology of writing, but it promises the best results in a textological and editorial perspective.