Meandry ojcowskiej miłości. Wokół listów jakuckiej córki Wacława Sieroszewskiego

• Authors: Grażyna Legutko

Title variants

EN

The complexities of a father’s love. The letters of Wacław Sieroszewski’s Yakutian daughter

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

The study is an attempt to provide a more detailed account of the complicated story of the daughter of the Polish exile Wacław Sieroszewski and his Yakutian wife Arina Chelba-Kysa. The reflection is based on Maria Sieroszewska’s unpublished letters sent to her father (in Russian) in the 1920s and 1930s, now kept in the National Library archives in Warsaw and in the private collection of the writer’s grandson, Andrzej Sieroszewski. The eponymous “com- plexities” of fatherly love concern the tragedy of both the parent and the child. The difficult decision to leave his teenage daughter, entrusting her to his friends and not taking her with him to his homeland, to which the writer was able to return from his Siberian exile in 1898, had a number of inevitable consequences. Seeing Sieroszewski’s behaviour as treason is too radical an attitude; instead, his conduct should be linked to a lack of choice — it can be explained both by personal factors (political-legal considerations) and personal factors (unstable financial situation). An analysis of the surviving correspondence and Sieroszewski’s Memoirs shows that both felt the tragedy of not being together very acutely, although each probably in his or her own way. However, the fate of Maria, left behind in Russia, seems to be far more tragic than her father’s ethical dilemmas. On the one hand, we are dealing with an orphanhood complex, a sense of being rejected, the problem of dual ethnicity and rootlessness, a constant struggle with poverty and disease, finally the trauma of the Gulag; on the other — the problem of the father’s guilt, lack of a sufficiently strong emotional bond with his daughter, inability to establish a more profound contact, problems with bringing her to Poland for good, or failed attempts to integrate Maria with her Polish family. The present analysis does not lead to unequivocal conclusions, but shows that the dramatic story of Maria Sieroszewska — half-Yakutian, half-Russian, but, in fact, Russian — still contains a number of puzzles yet to be solved, and, like the biography of her father, is open to further exploration. Translated by Anna Kijak

• Publisher: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego
• Journal: Wrocławskie Studia Wschodnie
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 16
• Pages: 43 - 75

Contributors

author

Grażyna Legutko

• Uniwersytet J ana Kochanowskiego w Kielcach