Dzienniki Józefa Czapskiego, szkicowniki Stanisława Rodzińskiego, szkicowniki Bogusława Bachorczyka

Józef Czapski’s diaries, which were at the time in his room in Maisons-Laffitte near Paris, the seat of Polish-émigré Parisian “Kultura” [Culture] magazine, are at present owned by the National Museum in Krakow in the total number of 273 “notebooks”. Czapski started writing them already before the WW2. The volumes of 1942–1991 have been preserved till now. In majority, they have remained unknown except for very few editions of the elaborated by the author himself “torn-out pages” or recently published reproduced “selected pages”. They combine matching disciplines of literature (an intimate diary) and art (a sketchbook with numerous drawings and watercolour sketches within the text). In comparison with the original, with its exceptional écriture, the previous editions of the selected pieces seem to be unsatisfactory. In the future they will surely exist in an interactive digital form, which offers so many possibilities of joining text with image next to its publication in a shape of a traditional book, which cannot reflect its intermedia character. They will find their place in a new environment and stop having been framed in a Modernist way. Many artists, especially those younger than Czapski, were fascinated with him. After “Thaw” of 1956 and later on in the 1970s and 1980s, some of the artists living in Poland did have a chance of seeing his diaries while visiting Czapski in Maisons-Laffitte. The example of Czapski’s diaries influenced a few of them, who decided to give a character of a diary to their own sketchbooks. A friend of Czapski, Stanisław Rodziński (b. 1940) has been keeping his sketchbooks and a sort of intimate diaries at the same time, in their current shape since 1976. Bogusław Bachorczyk (b. 1969), younger than the latter, who has never happened to meet Czapski in person, has already reached 45 volumes. Czapski’s diaries are a complete work, still the sketchbooks inspired by his diary-like pieces, created in characteristic “handwriting” of their authors, are in a certain sense Czapski’s diaries extension.