Hanna Malewska

Hanna Malewska (1911–1983) was a Polish historian and writer, author of historical stories and novels, translator, Home Army soldier, member of the Tygodnik Powszechny team, and editor-in-chief of the monthly Znak.

The years spent at this school (1921–1929), in a class with an extended humanistic profile, allowed her to acquire basic education and language skills.

From these masters, she acquired the methodology and humility to engage in time-consuming historical research and conduct in-depth analysis of archival sources.

In a competition marking the centenary of the outbreak of the November Uprising, she was awarded a prize for two unpublished and now probably lost works entitled Battle of Rogożnica and Międzyrzecze and Chrzanowski’s Expedition in the Lublin Region.

In 1935, together with her mother, she moved to Warsaw and up to 1940 worked as a teacher of history and the introduction to philosophy at Krystyna Malczewska's Gymnasium and Lyceum (middle and high school).

[1] Thanks to the Jagiellonian Library collection, as a beginning teacher, she was able to continue her historical studies, the purpose of which was to write a novel about Charles V of Hapsburg (1516–1556) and his vision of uniting Europe.

It was not so much the political aims that interested Malewska as the monarch's moral perspective, his in-depth psychological portrait, and understanding the person as an existential phenomenon.

This book established her reputation as a young talented writer whom critics considered the most promising author in the historical novel genre.

[1] In 1938, having received a National Culture Fund of Poland scholarship, she left for France, where she undertook studies in European Middle Ages and analysed sources for her next novel as well as in order to compile an anthology of medieval texts.

She joined the military wing of the Polish Secret State, subsequently renamed Service for Poland's Victory (SZP), Union for Armed Struggle (ZWZ) and later the Home Army (AK).

During the occupation (1943–1944), she wrote a novel about Norwid, Harvest on the sickle (Żniwo na sierpie), presenting the poet as the nation's educator, who through his actions emphasised that rather than valour, equality, tolerance and freedom were the ideals of social life.

She completed the novel about Norwid shortly before the start of the Warsaw Uprising; the manuscript survived and was published in 1947, thus beginning the Polish theme in her writings.

In 1945 – as by then a renowned name in literature, the author of awarded novels – she joined a group centred around Fr Jan Piwowarczyk and Jerzy Turowicz which was planning to revive the Catholic press in Kraków.

She participated in the meetings of the founding fathers of Tygodnik Powszechny, where, starting from the second issue, for over a year (1/7/45 to 5/8/46), she wrote a weekly column entitled ‘Today’ (Dziś), analysing the everyday lives of Poles from the moral perspective.

[1] From the outset of her Kraków period, Malewska became active in several fields simultaneously: as a journalist, she wrote in the Catholic press of the time (chiefly Tygodnik Powszechny, the monthly Znak, Tygodnik Warszawski, Królowa Apostołów and the Poznań Życie Literackie); as a prose writer, she published short stories or fragments of novels she was still writing; as a historian, she collected sources for a gothic tale and in preparation of her written but never published Anthology of Medieval Culture (Antologa kultury średniowiecznej); as an editor, from September 1946, she worked as the editor-in-chief of the newly formed monthly Znak.

In the first period, after years of enforced silence, she threw herself into the whirlwind journalism, which at the time took precedence over her other literary activities: translation and editing.

The themes she dealt with can be divided into five categories: investigating worldviews (essays disputing Marxism), pedagogics, completing her Anthology of Medieval Culture, her Warsaw Uprising memoirs and her aphoristic writings, limited to short forms of expression.

In 1948, she began writing a gnomic type of prose in a column of the Kraków weekly entitled ‘Notes’ (Uwagi), which expressed moral and didactic ideas.

[1] The years 1952–1954 marked a departure from current affairs journalism and instead, Malewska focused on writing her gothic epic, which was set in the declining Roman Empire of the 6th century.

This dramatic tale, entitled The form of this world is passing away (Przemija postać świata) was published in 1954, in the Socialist Realism period, and placed her among the most renowned Polish authors.

She participated in discussions on the periodical's profile together with Stefan Swieżawski, Stefania Skwarczyńska, Jerzy Turowicz and Stanisław Stomma – the people behind the final decision for it to become a religious and philosophical journal.

In the third issue, the editorial policy line was supplemented by new editors-in-chief (S. Stomma, ‘Maksymalne i minimalne tendencje społeczne katolików’ [Maximal and minimal Catholic social tendencies]; H. Malewska, ‘Faryzeizm’ [Pharisaism], Znak, 1946, No.

The thus ideologically delineated periodical attracted academics, theologians and philosophers to cooperate in creating an important intellectual journal open to Western Christian culture.

On her own initiative, insofar as the censorship would permit, she would publicly react to current affairs, the consequences of the dropping of the bomb or the antisemitic pogrom in Kielce.

Her personally edited column ‘Events – Books – People’ – in a time when information was rationed – provided the latest news from what was broadly termed the world of culture.

At the start of the second phase of her journalistic activity up until 1960, she published series of essays about writer's ethics and the theory of knowledge, including a text entitled ‘On Responsibility’ (Tygodnik Powszechny, 1957, No.

17), where paraphrasing William Faulkner, she declared: ‘Nothing can destroy the good writer, and the only thing that could possibly alter him is death.’ In 1957, she again joined Znak, which was then reactivated under Editor-in-Chief Jacek Woźniakowski.

She translated and promoted foreign authors, including Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Georges Bernanos, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Yves Marie-Joseph Congar, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Christopher Dawson, Mircea Eliade, Thomas Stearns Eliot, Romano Guardini, Martin Heidegger, Hans Küng, Thomas Merton, Erwin Panofsky, Karl Popper, Karl Rahner and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The entirety of Malewska's prose writings, which became rarer with time, may be divided into three intertwining themes: ancient, medieval and matters concerning Poland.