Tracking or suppuration. On two notes from Leopold Buczkowski’s archive

Abstract

This article proposes the category of note-writing as a characteristic of both Leopold Buczkowski’s multi-media work and his literary archive deposited at the Adam Mickiewicz Museum of Literature in Warsaw and compiled by custodian Małgorzata Wichowska. This trait is confronted by an analysis of a selection of Buczkowski’s handwritten scribblings and small notes, particularly in the context of the fragments of the – unfinished and first published in 2022 – essays on art: The Art tracking and From Brush to Chisel. As well as being the only known attempts by Buczkowski to articulate a coherent aesthetic theory, they are also important for editing and fully understanding the final inscriptions of the last part of the War Diary. The text demonstrates that the analysis of unpublished notes, small notes and scribbles contextualises literary works, but above all brings us closer to reconstructing the creative process. In Buczkowski’s case, it coincides with the poetics of individual works and the aesthetics of the multi-media work in progress of which they are an element. Notes and note-taking thus turn out not to be the margins of literature and art, but its centre.