Does dailiness terrify an editor? Unpublished letters by Orzeszkowa to her closest friends

Abstract

The article attempts to answer the question why the immensely interesting collection of private correspondence by Eliza Orzeszkowa, letters to her closes friends, Maria and Maksymilian Obrębski from the years 1880–1909, was not included into the series of the writer’s Listy zebrane (nine volumes in the edition by Edmund Jankowski, published in 1954–1981) and puts forward a thesis that the reasons for that decision can be searched for in a number of fields: 1) editorial tradition, which has a different manner of valuation of intimate correspondence in collective editions of writers’ letters than the currently practiced, 2) difficulties with preparing footnotes and comments to texts which concern exclusively daily matters, 3) lack of key to cultural reading and understanding of privacy and intimacy.