Nineteenth century Poznań and its inhabitants in the diary format chronicle Przechadzki po mieście by Marceli Motty

Abstract

This article presents one of the most important Polish books in the diary format originated in the 19th century – Przechadzki po mieście (City Walks) authored by Marceli Motty, a well-known indefatigable eulogist of the nineteenth century Poznań, within the context of the image of the city and its inhabitants presented in the work. In his memoirs, the author aims at primarily investigating individual people’s lives, while the city of Poznań, its streets and squares, simply provides a background and a framework for successive “walks” in the adopted narration. The extraordinary virtues of the book, such as the fluency and richness of the language, sense of humour, narrative clearly energized by powerful anecdotal message, as well as an enormous amount of information on Poznań and its inhabitants (i.e. members of all of the nationalities present in the city), including primarily representatives of the local landed gentry, intelligentsia, and bourgeois class, make this work an outstanding source of its own kind of the venerated author’s personal record of events and impressions. This is a book to be savoured slowly for its richness and depth, rediscovered again and again with each rereading of the book, while its contents have been extensively and continuously explored by historians, city tour guides and all those interested in the history of the capital of Greater Poland in the nineteenth century.