Authors

Marcin Cieszkiel¹;  ¹ University of Toronto, Canada

Discussion

The Polish language publication Pamiętnik Kijowski (The Kievan Memoir) published by the Koło Kijowian (Circle of Kievans) in London, England from 1959 to 1995, presents a parfocal historic imagination of a Polish identity conceived as hybridic, polyvalent, and deeply divided within its core’s allegiances to tradition wrestling with historical progress. 
The Circle is comprised of Polish émigrés once living in Right-bank Ukraine following generations of struggle against the Russian Empire in the 19^th and 20^th century. To preserve a version of its living cultural legacy through the writing and the iconography of the Pamiętnik Kijowski, the Koło undertakes a project which attempts to communicate with an identity as an expression of a vision of the past. It is a system of fashioning its own self-image through the aid of memory and history, in the capacity of the genres of the memoir and historical essay which will feature in my paper.  
I will problematize the historiographic approach of the first volume of the Memoir, in so far as the ethos of the anniversary year is concerned. The 300^th year anniversary of the Treaty of Hadziacz coincides with the first tome of the Memoir in 1959. As an example of this, I will investigate the volume’s major work, written by Walerian Kwiatkowski. The ensuing symbolism of Hadziacz and the anniversary effect the form of the historical essay as a method of adapting factual events to the Polish-Ukrainian-Anglo context following World War II.
      
Viewing the past as a series of living apertures disrupting the process of historical formations and potentialities among the Polish émigrés, offers an interpretation of the Polish identity post-World War II. I want to show how the engendering of a palliative impulse requiring the individual to collectively participate in acts of written reflection breeds a certain pathologization of history. The consequences which are prescient today, in raising of specters edifying the suffering and sacrifice of a homeless peoples' history.