Mieczyslaw Karlowicz Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The monographs, essays, collections of letters, iconographic material and other sources of information on the life and works of Fryderyk Chopin were, by the turn of the twentieth century, numerous and varied. Karłowicz’s Niewydane dotychczas pamiątki po Chopinie (Unpublished souvenirs of Chopin), published in Warsaw and in Paris in 1904 is probably the first truly organic monographic miscellany of letters, drawings, other iconographic material, memoirs and other documents, written at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, Karłowicz had arranged for the sources in his possession to be translated into French in order to have them published also in Paris, in the journal Revue musicale.
According to new sources, however, it is also possible that his hurry to publish the work made Karłowicz turn, even before the Revue musicale, to other journals that were not strictly musical. An unpublished letter which I have recently discovered sheds light on some important details with regard to his negotiations with another French periodical and, as we shall see, fills a number of gaps left by existing scholarship. Preserved among the Brunetière papers held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, this letter is addressed to Ferdinand Brunetière himself, with the aim of making a proposal for the publication of the material, probably in the Revue des deux mondes, one of the most important and prestigious cultural journals of the period, the editor of which Brunetière was at the time. This document tells us much more about Karłowicz’s intentions and editorial principles filling in this biographical gap and revealing new evidence about Niewydane dotychczas pamiątki po Chopinie.