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Jakuck. A soirée with Michał Książek.
Thursday, the 21st of November, 6 p.m.
Księgarnia Pod Globusem bookstore, ul. Długa 1 Krakow
The Wydawnictwo Czarne publishing house, New Eastern Europe and the Księgarnia Pod Globusem bookstore would like to invite everyone to a meeting with writer and Siberian guide Michał Książek.
I am convinced that Editor Giedroyc would be happy. Michał Książek carried out the proposal from the last edition of “Notatki Redaktora” (“Editor’s Notes”) by going on a fascinating journey following Sieroszewski’s Siberian stories and discovering this unjustly forgotten author to us. Combining linguistic and ethnographic notes with a reportorial account of his own experiences of life in Yakutsk, Książek continues the excellent tradition of Polish explorations of Siberia in a modern way. I’ll even say that such descriptions of the cold have never before appeared in Polish literature. I am genuinely impressed!
Mariusz Wilk
Edward Piekarski, exiled to Siberia in 1888, wrote a dictionary of the Yakut (Sakha) language. Wacław Sieroszewski landed in Siberia ten years earlier, and the result of his years-long exile is an outstanding ethnographic work, Dwanaście lat w kraju Jakutów [Twelve Years in the Land of the Yakuts]. Michał Książek went to the Yakutia (Sakha) Republic of his own free will. Following the tracks of his great predecessors, he travelled across this vast white land, fascinated with the customs and the language of its inhabitants. Yakutia, a country of an area nine times larger than Poland, is inhabited by just under a million people. Winter lasts for most of the year, so there are innumerable terms for types of snow and frost, and the cold is so severe sometimes that in the Yakut language, the friendly Ded Moroz (Father Frost) was replaced with the Bull of Winter. Declining Yakut words using Polish case forms, Książek writes a kind of peculiar grammar of this distant, yet close, snowy expanse.
Admission is free. Don’t miss it!