Język Polski
English
From Berg to Bernstein: Stanisław Wojciechowski’s Ideological Reading Trajectories in Letters from England (1900–1905)
Małgorzata Bańkowska
Abstract
In 1899, Stanisław Wojciechowski and his wife Maria, née Kiersnowska, moved to London, where the headquarters of the Foreign Union of Polish Socialists had been located since 1893. There, he began working as a typesetter at the London press “Przedświt” (Dawn), and then at the Tolstoyan press (Purleigh, Tuckton). The events of 1900 – the discovery of the secret press of Robotnik in Łódź and the arrest of Józef Piłsudski, as well as the split in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) – forced him to assume the leadership of the party and resume his duties as editor of Robotnik. Preserved in the New Records Archive in Warsaw and the Józef Piłsudski Institute in New York, his correspondence from 1900–1905 includes over 140 letters addressed to members of the Foreign Committee of the PPS in London, including Bolesław Jędrzejowski, Feliks Perl, and Leon Wasilewski. The aim of this article is to present the ideological and philosophical writings discussed in the letters of the future president, including the works of Mikołaj Berg, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, and others. The material was studied using critical source analysis and bibliological methods, including bibliographic analysis. The analysis revealed little-known details of Wojciechowski’s political activities during his exile in England, as well as many insights related to his private life and his interest in philosophical literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The correspondence preserved in the Central Archives of Modern Records in Warsaw and in the Józef Piłsudski Institute in New York, covering the years 1900–1905, includes more than 140 letters addressed to members of the Foreign Committee of the PPS in London, among them Bolesław Jędrzejowski, Feliks Perl, and Leon Wasilewski.
The aim of the article is to present the ideological and philosophical writings present in the letters of the future President, including works by Nikolai Berg, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein, and others. In analyzing the material, the method of critical source analysis was applied alongside bibliological methods, including bibliographical analysis. The conducted study made it possible to uncover little-known aspects of Wojciechowski’s political activity during his English emigration, as well as numerous interesting facts concerning his private life and his engagement with philosophical literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This study was prepared as part of the project PRESIDENT STANISŁAW WOJCIECHOWSKI. HIS ERA, ACHIEVEMENTS, MEMORY, co-funded from the state budget under the program of the Ministry of Education and Science Science for Society II (No. NdS-II/SP/0056/2023/01).
Keywords:
Stanisław Wojciechowski (1869–1953), Polish Socialist Party, socialism, political pressDetails
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