Antoni Kamieński – ilustrator „ukochanej książki pokolenia”

Antoni Kamieński (1860-1933), a Polish draughstman, dealt among other things with book illustration. In the end of the nineteenth century he made nineteen drawings, depicting episodes from Adam Szymański's stories and collected in the volume Szkice [Sketches] (the edition of 1897). The collection included the drawings describing the everyday life of Polish exiles to Siberia: Two Prayers, Srul from Lubartów, Maciej Mazur. The author gave prominence in them to the martyrological aspect. He stressed the suffering of Polish patriots who, for their fight to liberate their homeland from the conquerors, were punished by them and had to live far away from their homeland, in Siberia, in “the land of icy Plutonium”, as Szymański writes. Kamieński's washed drawings correspond with the literary text. The artist transformed some features of the academic manner, so as to expose the reality of Siberia, such as landscape, people and objects. He was most fascinated with the specific atmosphere of Siberian life. That is why the motif of nostalgia after his homeland and a melancholic consent of the exiles to their hardship is the main atmosphere of the majority of paintings. Simple artistic means that Kamiński uses serve to stress this aura. He gave up creation on behalf of faithfulness to the literary original.