UNESCO adds Kultura archive to its registers

The ceremony, Tuesday, was attended by UNESCO’s director general Irina Bokova, the Polish Ambassadors to France and UNESCO, as well as the chairman of the French-Polish Group in the French Parliament Senator Yann Gaillard.

The Kultura Literary Institute in Paris was one of the most important institutions of Polish post-war émigré circles.

The Institute’s archives comprise the complete documentation of its activities in the years 1946-2000, giving unique insights into the work of an institution which, thanks to the intellectual and political vision implemented by its founder Jerzy Giedroyc and his associates, played a vital role in the peaceful victory over the communist dictatorship and the division of the world into two hostile political blocs.

The archives include the letters of Jerzy Giedroyc to many prominent Polish writers (Milosz, Gombrowicz, Herling-Grudzinski, Stempowski, Wankowicz) and foreign intellectuals and politicians (Albert Camus, Bertrand Russell, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger), the manuscripts of Witold Gombrowicz’s Diaries, materials relating to the Kultura Monthly, a leading Polish émigré journal, published from 1947 to 2000, as well as a collection of some 100,000 books.

The Kultura archives are among nine Polish items in the UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ Register, alongside the autograph of Copernicus’s ‘De revolutionibus’, the manuscripts of Fryderyk Chopin and the Twenty One Postulates of the striking workers of the Gdansk Shipyard of August 1980. (mk/jb)