STANISŁAW KRYŃSKI – CONTRIBUTION TO THE BIOGRAPHY

Abstract

As a young man Stanisław Kryński, our Polish scholar, intended to devote his life to Roman Law. The fact may be surprising as Kryński received a great deal of attention thanks to his Polish translations of English poetry and the first volume of The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. The first archival research shows that in his youth Kryński was really into Roman Law and was even going to do his doctorate on “Iudicum familiae erciscundae in a Classic Roman Law”. He became the assistant of the professor Ignacy Koschembahr-Łyskowski while studying at the Faculty of Law and State Science at the University of Warsaw. The professor became his academic mentor and enabled him to serve an academic apprenticeship in Rome in 1938. The outbreak of the Second World War pulled the rug from under Kryński’s feet. But still, the skills and knowledge acquired in Warsaw were extremely valuable when he lectured Roman Law at the Polish Faculty of Law in Oxford in the years 1944–1946. After returning to Poland, he became a higher education lecturer at SGH Warsaw School of Economics and at Catholic University of Lublin. He did not carry on the research into Roman Law.