Fund for the Continuity of Polish Independent Litterature and Humanities – the Reaction of Polish Emigration to the Martial Law
This article presents the activity of the Fund for the Continuity of Polish Independent Litterature and Humanities, one of the reactions of the Polish intellectual emigration to the state of war triggered in Poland on December 13, 1981. Created in the Parisian circles of the magazine Kultura, the Fund brings together great personalities, such as: Józef Czapski, Jerzy Giedroyc, Konstanty Jeleński, Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski, Czesław Miłosz. The nature of these activities and the renown of its animators places it in a more global and older strategy, initiated during the Cold War and aimed at the “de-Sovietization” of the minds in Western intellectual circles. This work is carried out on the basis of unpublished archives, retracing the two main axes of the activity of the Fund: editorial action and allocation of grants for representatives of the independent Polish culture. The Fund invested about five million French francs between 1982 and 1990 to co-finance the edition of 56 books and to award numerous grants for Polish creators for stays in the West. Its activity, spread over the decades 80 and 90, can be seen as a final touch in a broader strategy that contributed to the collapse of European communism.
