The aim of this article is to present women’s alternative autobiographical practices on the example of Audre Lorde’s “Zami. A New Spelling of My Name”. The book, published in 1982, is one of the first non-canonical autobiographical writings by women. The author intentionally gives her autobiographical story a form that goes beyond the autobiography (rooted e.g. in Jean-Jacques Rousseau “Confessions”), both in terms of form and content. The alternative dimension of “Zami” is reflected mostly in Lorde’s attempt to break with a linear timeline of her story. She interweaved different threads of her life to focus on her process of emancipation and self-development as a Black woman, poet and feminist, growing up during the time of racial segregation in the United States (1950s and 1960s). “Zami” emerged from combining biography and myth, historical facts with her poems and dreams. This way of Lorde’s autobiographical writing was categorized as „biomythography”.

The article focuses on “Memoirs” of Aleksandra Piłsudska. They were prepared as a result of strong emotional experiences caused by the outbreak of war, and present a picture of strong and active women. On this basis we provide wider considerations on the problems of gender and individuation in biographic research.

The main purpose of this article is to attempt to show the collective biography of Polish women parliamentarians of the interwar period through an insight into their emotions and feelings, to show the “emotional communities” presented by Barbara Rosenwein. In this text I will focus on the main problems of the political activity of Polish women parliamentarians in the interwar period. Source materials produced by women, mainly ego-documents and public documents created by them, will be used to develop this topic. The study will analyze the individual experiences of women parliamentarians. Their emotions, opinions and reflections on parliamentary work will be taken into account. The paper will also discuss selected biographical aspects of the women parliamentarians, such as their age, education and political views, which undoubtedly had an impact on their opinions and emotions. Polish women parliamentarians of that time had to struggle with many problems. Reluctance to place women on candidate lists was a common occurrence. Moreover, women had to meet numerous social expectations. First of all, they were required to be mothers and wives who were responsible for family life, that is, the private sphere. Furthermore, women were seen more as social activists than as politicians. At the same time, men considered women’s issues less important, which was evident in parliamentary discussions. The main research questions were: How did women perceive their own political activity? political activity? What problems did politically active women face?

Victor Cădere (born 1891) was a Romanian lawyer, civil servant, diplomat and politician. He participated as an officer in the war with Bulgaria (1913) and in the I-st World War (1916–1918). Then he was at the peace conference in Paris as part of the Romanian delegation. In the years 1919–1921 he was dealing with the repatriation of Romanians from the USA and Russia. After returning to the country, in 1925, he began an academic career, which he continued with interruptions until his death in France in 1981. At that time, he was an activist of the peasant party and a member of the Chamber of Deputies. In the years 1930–1932 he held high official positions in the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior. In 1932, he began his career as a diplomat. His first post was Warsaw, where he was to watch over the matters of the Romanian-Polish alliance securing both countries against the threat from the USSR. Before he actually took office, however, he became the Romanian negotiator on the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, but risked Nicolae Titulescu – an influential diplomat and politician who opposed them and soon became Cădere’s superior, i.e. the minister of foreign affairs. After settling in Warsaw, the new MP tried to work for the development of the alliance. However, he encountered obstacles on the part of Titulescu, who wanted to loosen his ties with the Republic of Poland and bring him closer to Moscow. This affected the fate of Cădere, who was dismissed in July 1935. His diplomatic career slowed down. He took up another post – in Belgrade – only after the fall of Titulescu in 1936, then he was a member of parliament in Lisbon (1941–1944). From 1945 to 1967 he stayed in Romania. In the years 1952- 1956 he was imprisoned by the communist authorities. In 1967 he remained in exile in France.

The purpose of this article is to present the political views of Tadeusz Świecki, an activist of the National Democracy in the Płock Mazovia region. The article is based on archival materials, scientific studies and journalistic articles. In structural terms it consists of two separate parts. The first one presents basic biographical data. The second part analyses political views. In order to achieve the aim, two main research methods have been used: biographical and content analysis. The main research hypothesis assumes that Tadeusz Świecki was an undoubted leader of the Płock National Democrats. According to the second hypothesis, he was an original political thinker who tried to synthesize national-democratic views with political Romanticism.

The main thesis of this article is that the concept of “bio/hagio/graphy” is the key to understanding the communication mechanisms of the narrative on historical figures regarded as national heroes and/or saints of the Catholic Church in the context of recent Polish history. The author of this text, perceiving biography as a set of narrative practices, notices that in “bio/hagio/graphy” these practices are subordinate to the hagiographic attitude towards the protagonist of the story adopted by the author of the work. This phenomenon is exemplified by the process of shaping bio/hagio/ graphic narrative about Stanisława Leszczyńska. Various stages of reconstructing the biography of the “midwife from Auschwitz” were distinguished, in which the biographical narrative evolved from autobiographical testimony through hagiographic practices of the religious community to the popular circulation of literature, not necessarily of confessional nature.

The article focuses on the political and ideological evolution of Andrzej Micewski, with a particular study of the years 1945–1956. This journalist, initially associated with Tygodnik warszawski and Stronnictwo Pracy, made a connection with the group „Today and Tomorrow” after the fall of the independent Christian Democratic trend. Initially, he was a spokesman for the Catholic „third Road” there, but with time he became one of the most ardent supporters of „Catholic socialism” and ideologist of the „PAX” Association. His journalism fully supported the mainstream of official propaganda, expressing his enchantment with the system, incl. in assessing the internal and international situation, as well as in the context of the relationship between the state and the Church, in which he clearly stood on the side of the authorities repressing independent clergy. In 1956, however, he left PAX, founding the weekly magazine “For and Against” and co-creating the concept of a “non-partisan democratic left”. Its defeat probably caused him to believe that there were no prospects for ideological public activity. With time, his activities became more and more machiavellian, also he establishing cooperation with state security agencies. He was active in the “Znak” movement, trying unsuccessfully to build his own faction in it, and in the 1980s he collaborated with the Polish Episcopate and “Solidarity”. In the Third Polish Republic there was deputy to the Sejm, however, already expressing disappointment with political activity. His fascination with Prince Talleyrand was symbolic - it meant that he covered his opportunistic game with great ideas. Thus, he turned from an idealist, a believer in socialism, into a cynical official. He treated politics only as a zero-sum game, despite his excellent understanding of the arcana of politics, which he proved in his extensive historical journalism.

The aim of the article is to present a part of the biography of Sygurd Wiśniowski – a 19th-century traveler, writer and industrialist who appeared quite unexpectedly in the Polish press and was almost as quickly forgotten. The article is an attempt to present the possibility of using scattered press releases and epistolography in biographical studies. The value of press reports as a source of the facts is proved by a number of thematic studies. The atricle is based on a query of Polish press and Polish diaspora press and completed with an analysis of the traveler’s private letters, which allowed to verify the facts. Information obtained from the numerous press titles and letters suplement the current state of research with unknown or weakly known facts, making it possible to build an outline of a biography documented in the sources. The studies showed that a number of biographical findings about Sygurd Wiśniowski, which are established in the current literature on the subject, requires correction, and research in this field of press sources is promising.

The research aim of the article was to present the broadly understood speleological activity of the brothers Tadeusz and Stefan Zwoliński. The text presents biographies of both described characters, then the individual stages of their speleological activity are analyzed in detail, and in the end the legacy of the Zwoliński brothers is characterized. The speleological activity of the Zwoliński brothers lasted several dozen years in total: it began during the Austro-Hungarian period, was continued with many successes in the interwar period and ended after the Second World War in the Polish People’s Republic. At the threshold of their activity, only 44 caves in the Polish Tatras were known. The activity of the Zwoliński brothers finally brought the knowledge of nearly 120 new cave facilities. Their various publications also provided a model for the development of cave documentation and influenced the tourist and scientific activities carried out there. The article is a contribution to further research on the history of Polish speleology.

Interwar period in history of European Social Democracy was a time of great hopes, but also huge, even dramatic failures. However, in the following article I argue that two decades between world wars (especially the 1930s) were a time of deep ideological reassessment in major European Social Democratic parties too. Inspired by Tommaso Milani’s work „Hendrik de Man and Social Democracy. The Idea of Planning in Western Europe, 1914-1940”, I try to present a portrait of Hendrik de Man, one of the most original, but also the most controversial, thinker of interwar Social Democracy. At first, I closely studied the intellectual roots of de Man’s „planism” – agenda, which was to be the ground-breaking answer for the deep political crisis of Social Democracy in the first half of the 1930s. De Man’s „Plan of Labour” (Le Plan du Travail) was a package of structural reforms, which should – according to de Man himself – boost economic growth in the short term, but also create firm foundations for the planned economy in the long term. In contrast to the Marxist orthodoxy, de Man believed that socialization of already monopolized heavy industry and state control over the banking sector are sufficient conditions for an effective planned economy. Furthermore, „Plan of Labour” propaganda campaign was to inflame enthusiasm among the working-class constituency of the Belgian Social Democracy and attract potential new, non-proletarian supporters. De Man’s „planism” in the middle of the 1930s aroused interest among socialists and social democrats in the whole Europe. Despite of the anathema caused by de Man’s collaboration with Nazis during World War II, the sole idea of „planism” represents important episode in intellectual history of Social Democracy and might be perceived as an early symptom of the evolution, which led to rejection of the Marxism and adoption of capitalist welfare state model after World War II.