Wydawnictwo Sic!
Warsaw 2007
135x205
268 pages
paperback
ISBN: 978-83-60457-17-7
Translation rights: Wydawnictwo Sic! |
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Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz Hanging
Hanging is a novel dealing with historical events that took place in Warsaw between mid-April and the beginning of November 1794. This was the time of Poland's sudden move for national independence directed against Russia, which went down in history as the Kosciusko insurrection. Rymkiewicz has concentrated on the acts of violence that formed part of the uprising at the end of the 18th century – public executions by hanging. In this the way the citizens of Warsaw took their vengeance out on the prominent politicians and military leaders who had proved themselves traitors to the national cause and who, it was proved, had been handsomely bribed by the Russians. The writer reconstructs all the circumstances surrounding their executions. Making use of hundreds of documents from that period, he describes where the gallows were raised, how the renegades sentenced to death by hanging looked and behaved in their last moments and what was done with their bodies. The writer's extraordinary inquisitiveness is a delight. The author of Hanging compares all the various reports and where any serious doubts exist as to the real course of events, he applies the principles of investigative deduction. This book is not just a historical study devoted to a stormy episode of the distant past, but an unusually penetrating essay on the mechanisms of history. One of the more important plots here is the varied assessment of the Polish revolution of 1794 – seen from the viewpoint of the Poles who witnessed it, and from the modern perspective. Among other things, Rymkiewicz wonders about the consequences of refraining from regicide (it was only by a miracle that the last king of Poland, corrupted to the core by the Russians, avoided the gallows).
Dariusz Nowacki
Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz – born 1935. Poet, prose writer, historian of literature and winner of the 2003 Nike Award for his volume of poems Sunset in Milanówek. Author of essayistic novels about the lives and works of the famous Polish writers: Alexander Fredro, Juliusz Słowacki and Adam Mickiewicz and the original fictional "encyclopaedias”: Leśmian. Encyclopaedia (2001) and Słowacki. Encyclopaedia (2004).
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