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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Dwie drogi ze Wschodu na Zachód. Szkic biograficzny do historii polskich losów XIX i XX wieku

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The article was inspired by the biography of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka. The rich life of Zofia Kossak was full of extraordinary situations and twists and turns, but above all, her life was characterized by a constant journey. The road from one end of Europe – Ukraine, to the other – the British Isles. Her story became a pretext for presenting the path that two other Poles traveled from the eastern ends of Europe towards its heart and western borders. The first of them was known, although widely, but only from one chapter of the biography – Gabriel Narutowicz. An extremely interesting figure, who came to Switzerland from Lithuania for health reasons in the mid-1880s. He has found his new home in Switzerland for nearly forty years. The second is a less known, but with an equally rich life as Zofia Kossak and Gabriel Narutowicz – Joachim Bartoszewicz. In the pages of Polish history, Bartoszewicz went down in the years 1906–1913, the long-term editor of the largest Polish daily newspaper in Ukraine – “Dziennik Kijowski”, and later also a senator of the Second Republic of Poland and the first president of the National Party (1928–1936). Just like Narutowicz had to travel from East to West, which saved his life. This is how Bartoszewicz at the turn of 1918 and 1919 made a several-week journey from Kiev to Paris, where he become a member of the Polish National Committee. In the capital of France, alongside Roman Dmowski, he represented the interests of Poles at the peace conference. The stories of their journeys presented in the text constitute two of the thousands of examples of Polish fates that have to travel through the picturesque spaces of the Old Continent.