With “a thorn pierced into the heart”. Michał Zieliński’s road to fame

Abstract

Michał Zieliński (1905-1972) from Jarosław inscribed in the history of his family city as a talented poet and musician, a song composer, out of whose compositions the earliest one to move to the top was the soldier song entitled “Serce w plecaku” (“Heart in the Backpack”). The popularity of short literary-musical forms of his own authorship he owed to the period of military service at the garrison in Jarosław, where his talents were recognized and also to the demand for musical culture propagated in regional healing-leisure centers of the Second Republic of Poland at those times. A resort of this kind, a well-known and popular in Poland then was Truskawiec (at present a town in Ukraine). The orchestra of the 3rd regiment of infantry legions was a substitute of a musical academy for Zieliński, under the guidance of a professional coming from Bydgoszcz, a drum major lieutenant Tadeusz Dawidowicz. During the concert season in Truskawiec in September 1933 the first public performance of the song “Serce w plecaku” took place. First publication of the song signed by the author (without the refrain) can be found in the collection entitled “Wiersze żołnierskie” (“Soldier poems”) published by the Military Scientific-Educational Center in Warsaw in 1938. The enormous success of the song came with the events of the Second World War. This success was not in any way produced by the author and the composer but by many known and unknown performers. This song was sung everywhere. In the circumstances of conspiracy a few times it was anonymously published since 1943 in the form of the Gebethner and Wolff editions as well as the piratical editions. After the war the creator of the song as the member of ZAiKS (Polish Society of Authors and Composers) had to face the attacks from the usurpers in the fight for copyrights (the objects of this greed were, of course, royalties). The first publication, authorized by Zieliński after the war, of the lyrics took place in the anthology “Poets for soldiers 1410-1945” (Warsaw 1970), edited by Janusz Kapuścik and Wojciech J. Podgórski. The dam for the press discussion was finally laid by their article “Prawo do “Serca w plecaku”” (“The right to the “Heart in the Backpack””) (“Życie Warszawy” 1975, no. 107, p. I).