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We believe the Diaries of Kazimierz Bujnicki, covering the years 1795-1875, to be of interest not only for the Polish reader. This unique texts provides a broad picture of the life of Polish gentry in the 19th-century Latvia. The childhood memories of the author are dominated by themes related to the magnate family of Platerowie of Krasław, and the descriptions of young Bujnicki's travels to Towian, Vilnius, and Petersburg.
In the sections concerning the later years, the author focuses his attention on political and literary questions. The latter volume of the Diaries contains a highly captivating description of Bujnicki's meeting with Tzar Alexander I in the year 1815. Later, the author describes in detail the dramatic events accompanying coming to power of Tzar Nicholas. The appendix to the Volume 1 contains a broad narrative on the January Rising in the former Polish Livonia. The work ends with Bujnicki's brief self-reflection and description of his literary work.
The Diaries presented here bring a wealth of remarks on customs and life of his contemporaries, information on the cultural life of nobles and magnates. Primarily, however, they are a fascinating document of a particular, borderland identity and political awareness of people related through religion, culture and language with their irreversibly lost state; living between two ethnicalities they found alien: the mighty Russian and the hardly perceptible Latvian.
The manuscript of Kazimierz Bujnicki's Diaries is a property of the Academic Library in Riga. The existence of Bujnicki's works was, until recently, unknown in Poland, as, according to bibliographic information available, it was believed to have burnt in the fire of his house in 1863.
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