Gdzie powinna znajdować się polska literatura? Casus Aleksandra Wata
Where Should Polish Literature Be? The Case of Aleksander Wat

Summary/Abstract: This article takes the issue of transfers of Polish literature literally – as the physical transfer of writers’ archives from place to place, to archives located in different countries and on different continents. Aleksander Wat’s legacy is treated as a synecdoche of the fate of the archives of other émigré writers, such as Czesław Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert or Witold Gombrowicz. These considerations are complemented by the presentation of archival typescripts and manuscripts, as well as a never-published transcript of a conversation between Ola and Andrzej Wat, the then heirs to the legacy of the author of Mój wiek [My Age], and the stakeholders of institutions such as the Museum of Literature in Warsaw, the Ossolineum Library in Wrocław or the Polish Library in Paris (Jacek Trznadel, Krzysztof Rutkowski and Marek Prokop, among others), who debated in the 1980s about the future of the archive. The juxtaposition between the conversation, held under specific political conditions, and the further fate of the archive is interesting. This very specific issue then becomes a trigger for a more general reflection on the history of Polish archives – doomed to these transfers – in a situation of permanent historical uncertainty. It seems that the fate of our archives reflects the uncertainty of the fate of the entire nation.

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