“Chopin’s angel” and “unwritten poem”. On the correspondence by Halina and Kazimierz Wierzyński (a dozen letters and a handful of remarks)

Abstract

The subject of elaboration is the correspondence by Halina and Kazimierz Wierzyński, preserved in the poet’s archives in the Polish Library in London and unpublished up till now. The introduction presents a brief history of the marriage, discusses the nature of the correspondence dialogue (the leading threads and topics); it is also an attempt to sketch the emotional climate of the letters, allowing to present in more detail the psychological profiles of both authors from the private, at times intimate perspective. The editorial elaboration concerns 12 letters (selected from among about 150), which constitute the spouses’ dialogue from different periods of their shared biography (August 1941, July 1943, September 1957, February 1961, October 1963 and March 1964); in the introduction to each sequence, for the purpose of better understanding, the whereabouts of the poet’s separation with his wife are provided.