“Dealing with yourself”. The notebooks of Janina Łempicka-Kozarzewska in the light of research on ego-document

Abstract

The article presents the figure of Janina Łempicka-Kozarzewska, who was the mother of Jerzy Kozarzewski – a poet and soldier, an activist of the independence underground. The author presents the content of unpublished letters written by her to son in the years 1947–1952, when he was serving a ten-year sentence.

The study indicates the key context in which the letters were created and reconstructs the issues raised in them. The conclusions contained in the article from reading the manuscripts of Janina Łempicka, an educated intellectual, related to Cyprian Norwid (she was the daughter of Ksawery Norwid – brother of the author of Vade-mecum) place the collection of this correspondence, which was never sent to the addressee, in the trend of research on personal document literature. At the same time, they allow us to define new perspectives on this non-obvious genre form and point to the diary category (in Philippe Lejeune’s approach) which is useful for research in relation to the correspondence preserved in notebooks.