Karol Estreicher starszy. Między Krakowem, Lwowem i Warszawą

Abstract

ESTREICHER KAROL SENIOR. BETWEEN KRAKÓW, LVIV AND WARSAW

Karol Estreicher senior was the son of Alojzy Estreicher, director of the university botanical garden and subsequently rector of the Jagiellonian University. He received his education in Kraków at the Jagiellonian University. At the age of 19, he went to Warsaw for the first time. In his diaries he described Warsaw’s cultural life and noted down his observations on the differences between Warsaw and Kraków. He was particularly interested in the differences between Warsaw and Kraków theatres. In his diaries there are many references to the history of Kraków in the late 1840s and early 1950s, including a description of the tsarist troops marching through the city to help Austria suppress the Hungarian uprising, as well as of the dramatic fires in Kraków, including the most tragic conflagration in 1850. After taking up paid employment, Estreicher found himself in Lviv. He described his work as a lawyer in the capital of Galicia. Lviv from the 1850s and early 1860s appears in his diaries as a nest of German bureaucrats with anti-Polish attitudes and favouring the Ruthenian element. The Lviv period was for him a time of intense work on the history of Polish literature and on bibliography. In 1862 Estreicher became deputy director of the Library of the Main School in Warsaw, which at that time was a truly Polish city, as he wrote. According to the diaries, he did not support the outbreak of the Janary Uprising, which resulted in a tsarist retaliation meaning total restriction of freedom and intense Russification. After several years of work at the Warsaw School, in the face of progressing Russification and the requirement to teach in Russian, Karol Estreicher resigned from this financially lucrative position and became director of the Jagiellonian Library.