In competition with the Athens of Galicia : the Academic Reading Room of Przemyśl

The Academic Reading Room of Przemyśl, which functioned from 1892 until 1939, was one of the most robust cultural institutions in that town. It was a meeting place of the local, predominantly Jewish, intelligentsia, a venue for innumerable lectures, literary symposia, anniversary celebrations and social occasions. The list of lecturers who came to talk to the Przemyśl audience includes such names as Stanisław Przybyszewski, Gabriela Zapolska, Zofi a Daszyńska-Golińska, Bertold Merwin, Leopold Staff, Kazimierz Twardowski, and Bruno Schulz. Wilhelm Feldman, Konstanty Górski, Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki, and Cezary Jellenta were regular guests. It was here that Feldman first met his future wife Maria, an acclaimed translator (among the many books she translated into Polish was Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey). The ARR library was one of the biggest in Przemyśl. Its impressive array of lecturers, its network of contacts and its initiatives made the Academic Reading Room of Przemyśl an important and vibrant centre of intellectual life, especially in the decades that saw the fl ourishing of the Young Poland movement. Consequently, its records can be used to trace the dissemination and reception of modernist ideas, which, on the whole, tended to reach Przemyśl from Cracow. In the interwar period the ARR lost much of its former brilliance: its functioned primarily as a lending library and a centre of foreign language courses. Both in its heyday and in the later years the Academic Reading Room was one of the Przemyśl’s intellectual and cultural landmarks. Its successor, the Przemyśl Society of Friends of Science (Societas Scientiarumac Litterarum Premisliensis) is an institution dedicated to the study of the history and cultural heritage of Przemyśl and its region.