For our freedom and yours. Image of emigration in unpublished radio talks by Józef Łobodowski

Abstract

Today we are observing how the figure and works of Jozef Lobodowski – a poet, publicist and translator condemned to oblivion by the communist government of the Polish People’s Republic – are attracting renewed interest in the three countries that were his spiritual homeland: Poland, Ukraine and Spain. Specialists examine his work from a variety of perspectives: as a poet celebrating the Polish borderlands of the interwar period associated with the Lublin circle, as an artist inspired by the folklore of Ukraine and the Iberian Peninsula, or as an excellent translator of Russian, Ukrainian and Spanish literature. However, the political commitment of the poet, who, while in exile, continued to fight for a free Poland through the waves of Radio Madrid, is less often shown. In his previously unpublished Radio Talks, he left very interesting reflections on emigration and its role in the life of his distant homeland, understood not in political or national terms, but as a community of values, the most important of which he considered to be respect for the right to peaceful coexistence of people coming from different places and having different beliefs. This article reveals the hitherto unknown thoughts of a writer whose personal experience of banishment served to create a hopeful image of the emigrant and emigration. This positive vision of true Polishness – in which national differences disappear and to which everyone can belong, regardless of their origin – is the main message of Łobodowski’s emigrant thought.