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SHORT NOTES

together with the setbacks in hcr emotional life, turned that romantic girl into an activist fully devoted to the national cause, into an altruist who took the welfare of other peoplc to hcart. The diary also includes many interesting rcmarks cover-ing events, set down on paper as they happcned, including during the January Uprising of 1863-4, on the emergence of Galicia’s political autonomy and the disputes over the shape of Galician Poles’ patriotism, the First World War and the reconstruction of independent Poland. The diary cnds with short biographies of the persons mentioned by the author, and annexes which include the author’s reminiscences, ‘The Persons 1 Have Known’, and a letter written by her brother from the Olomouc (Ołomuniec) fortress where he was imprisoned for taking part in the January Uprising. Ali in all, this extensive book, though written in maudlin style, is an interesting record of a large part of Galicia’s history and of the reborn Polish Republic.

Dziennik has been published from handwritten cxercisc books kept in the National Ossoliński Institutc. Care was taken to limit the cditor’s interference to the minimum so as to allow the author herself to speak. (MM)

Krzysztof Zajas, Nieobecna kultura. Przypadek Inflant Polskich (Polish Livonia — An Absent Culture], Kraków 2008, ‘Univer-sitas\ 393 pp.

This is the first attempt in Polish historiography to tackle the phenomenon of Polish Livonia, a Baltic region which, as a result of dynastie agreements, had belonged to Poland until the fali of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the 18th century, was then incorporated into the Russian Empire and is now part of Latvia and Estonia.

The author discusses in detail the historical and anthropological roots of the Livonian phenomenon: the fact that the country lay at the point of contact be-twecn Polish, German and Russian expansion, at the point where three religions, Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox, met. He presents Polish 19th and 20th century Livonians (or Livonian Poles) as a redundant and completely forgotten link in the process of regional evolution. The book is based on literary and scientific tcxts from the region, from the period discusscd by the author.

The author claims that the issue of Polish Livonia is rarely discussed in the Polish humanities, nor is it present in Russian or German humanities. He tries to give it the place it deserves as a typical example of the identity of a multicultural, heterogeneous borderland region and, as a uniąue phenomenon of a region at the point of contact between many cultures. This attempt will most probably end in failure. (MM)