Kilka uwag o życiu i twórczości Jerzego Ręczyńskiego, autora poematu "Dziewica Litwy Emilia Plater"

ENA member of the November Uprising (1830–1831), and a Lithuanian noble, Jerzy Ręczyński (1805–1899) settled in exile, first in France, then in Great Britain. He was one of those amateurs who contributed to the culture of the Great Emigration, based on the ethos of the struggle for independence of Poland. The people who paid attention to his scholarly and literary legacy, regard his dissertations as incomplete, and his literary pieces as mediocre. An analysis of the whole of Ręczyński’s legacy reveals that his works perfectly reflect the author’s historical awareness and imagination. He left several published texts and many manuscripts that are dispersed in great part. During his lifetime, a number of linguistic texts was published and small literary pieces. In the early twentieth century in Lviv, his memoirs from the uprising were published under the title of Moja wojaczka 1825–1831 (My soldiering 1825–1831). His letters, notebooks with poems and prose, articles and varia are kept in the Polish Library in Paris. Among more important manuscripts there is his diary entitled Życiopis pana Jerzego z Ludwinowa od 1805 aż do 1881 roku w kraju i za granicą (The lifestory of Mr. Jerzy of Ludwinów from 1805 up to 1881 in the country and abroad), and a poem on Emilia Plater: Dziewica Litwy Emilia Plater (The Virgin of Lithuania Emilia Plater). Smaller manuscripts have been kept in various libraries in Poland. The author of the article has attempted to appraise the whole legacy of Ręczyński. Special attention is paid to the poem on Emilia Plater: its content is analysed, its inspiration sources are established, that is those historical and literary texts that served as the source material for Ręczyński; it were mainly poems by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Adam Mickiewicz, and Józef Straszewicz.