Rafał Malczewski - a Polish artist in Canada, and his correspondence in the archives of Polish emigration

Rafał Malczewski is one of the many forgotten Polish artists whose promising career was doomed to obscurity in the People's Republic of Poland and after 1989. His interdisciplinary oeuvre includes oil paintings, watercolours, graphic art, caricatures, fictional and autobiographical works, as well as dramas and a film, and a sizable epistolary legacy. Flirting with the literary and artistic avant-garde based in the town of Zakopane and the whole Podhale region and strongly influenced by the landscapes of Canada, where he settled after World War II, Malczewski is an example of an artist whose fate was marked by a dramatic struggle for daily existence in exile. The article presents the situation in which Rafał Malczewski found himself in Canada after 1942, as depicted in a selection of letters he sent for many years, until his death, to Mieczysław Grydzewski, a famous London editor of the literary periodical Wiadomości who supported the artist financially. The analysis of Malczewski's epistolary legacy is placed in the broader context of archival turn and the conviction that letters are places of memory and material evidence of the autobiographical gestur