Napis (Aug 2022)
From a trip East. On a different Europe and the genre-fluid nature of the letter in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s travel correspondence
Abstract
The article refers to Sienkiewicz’s journey to the East in Autumn 1886 and the writings remaining after that trip: private correspondence – letters to Jadwiga Janczewska (1886) and an account of the journey published in the Warsaw press entitled “Wycieczka do Aten” [A Trip to Athens], Niwa no. 1–3 (1889) (in a reprint: idem, Dzieła [Works], v. 44, Warsaw: 1950). An additional text used in the article is a memoir written by Antoni Zaleski from the same journey entitled Z wycieczki na Wschód. Notatki dziennikarza. Bukareszt. Ruszczuk. Warna. Konstantynopol [From the trip to the East. Journalist’s notes. Bucharest, Rustschuk, Varna, Constantinople] (Warsaw: 1887).The article highlights different aims of the journey that both of the authors had and confronts their specific visions of ‘other’, ‘wilder’ Europe – the Balkans and Greece, which are created anew after hundreds of years of Turkish captivity. Both of the correspondences contain interesting remarks on politics, culture and otherness. In the last part of this article the author pays attention to the fluctuations as a genre of a private letter and a letter form a journey, published in press, and also indicates to the anthropological sensitivity of the authors of correspondence.
