Poetic brochure by Józef Czechowicz

As Jan Śpiewak recalled, in the main room of Józef Czechowicz’s Warsaw apartment, there was to be a small, closed cupboard in which the poet would keep ‘hardcover notebooks in which he systematically wrote down poems, notes, thoughts, sketches, and verse plans’. He also pasted photographs there, noted down book drafts, and variations of his poems. Three such notebooks have survived to our times – one of them is in the Józef Czechowicz Museum in Lublin.

This notebook was probably taken from the poet’s apartment by Wacław Mrozowski after the poet’s tragic death. As we know from the notes of Wiktor Ziółkowski, the director of the Lublin Museum (and a friend of Józef Czechowicz) at the time, the book was first published in Lublin just after the war. Later, however, it returned to Mrozowski, who took the notebook to Lower Silesia. It fell into the hands of third parties – it was only found in the 1990s and in 1995 was purchased by the Museum in Lublin.

The booklet contains poems, notes and biographical sketches from the years 1936-1939, when the poet was working on the volume nuta człowiecza (The Human Note), which was published at the beginning of 1939. In the notebook one can find, among other things, the original version of the famous catastrophic poem żal (regret). Some of the manuscripts are also accompanied by drawings by Czechowicz himself. In addition to the poems, the notebook contains notes from the period of his stay in Słobódka in 1922, the family tree of Czechowicz’s mother’s family, and a sketch of an unknown dramatic piece, the protagonists of which were to be the Dziki family.

Jarosław Cymerman