The literary output of Stefan Balicki in the collection of the Dom Literatury at the Raczyński Municipal Library

Abstract

This article discusses the literary and critical output of Stefan Balicki (1899–1939) as well as rich research perspectives offered by examining the source materials available in the collection. Literary and biographical archival materials that document the life and artistic work of the Poznań-based writer and educationalist come from the family archives that were handed over to the Raczyński Municipal Public Library in 2003. Hand-written notebooks with his own poems and diaries kept in his school years and then during the war, but before Balicki settled down in Poznań, have a particular place in Balicki’s literary and cultural legacy. Collectively, the archival materials constitute a disparate yet fascinating corpus of biographical, literary and critical fragments, and at the same time are an important contribution to investigations into the beginnings of literary works of Balicki, especially those that were charactersied by intense poetic endeavors soon to be almost completely abandoned by the writer in his mature years of literary activity. The notebooks include autographs of a couple of hundreds of poetic texts, largely unpublished, that originated between 1916 and 1922. Another important documents in Balicki’s professional work are his diaries kept by the Balicki-educationalist and teacher of the private A. Mickiewicz Gymnasium in Poznań. These materials, still awaiting to be properly scientifically addressed by biographers and researchers, are a valuable complement to the archival material concerning the writer currently available in other libraries and documentation centers in Poland.