The post-war period in personal account literature. Contribution to the history and sociology of literary life in post-war Poland

Abstract

The article is an attempt to draw attention to the possibilities and role of personal writing in the description of the post-war period in literary terms, for example to the use of the information archives of that type of writing as material which verifies the presence and meaning of literary facts from that period. Such an approach is accompanied by the assumption of personal writing being a separate writing-reading circulation in the post-war period, and by the fact that it played a major role in literary and social communication, since it served as a kind of substitute, but in the literary practice of some authors, such as Nałkowska, Dąbrowska or Iwaszkiewicz, it set the directions for certain changes; personal accounts became the domain of their post-war writing. 

In the article, a number of introductory and general remarks have been formulated, concerning the origins of literary activity in post-war Poland, which emerge from writers’ personal notes, diaries and correspondence.