Homo inrogatus – Emil Korytko in the Light of His Letters to His Family

Abstract

Emil Korytko remains an unknown person in Poland, although in the 1980s Bożena Ostromęcka-Frączak tried to make Poles familiar with his ethnographic-literary work. The author makes an attempt to look at the young man’s correspondence as a literary testimony documenting the vicissitudes of one of Polish political prisoners living in the first half of the 19^th century. Those letters show that the authorities’ verdict making the convict leave his homeland becomes the direct reason of his defeat: 1. He is still supported by his family, which makes the relations between the son and his parents more complicated; 2. Emil finds carrying out his scientific-literary plans hard, and at the end of his life he does not even know if his work will be published; 3. The deplorable conditions Korytko lived under make him fall ill, and ultimately die. Moreover, his letters show that he consciously posed as a continuator of Zorian Dołęga-Mostowicz’s school, and a Romantic – Byronist, a lonely man, alienated from the world he lives in. Korytko’s correspondence that is not very well known to those who study Romantic literature, allows a better understanding the tragic vicissitudes of people whose life was to alarge degree affected by history of national independence movements.