Irena Dobrzycka (1909–2007)

Professor Dobrzycka was born on 21 October 1909 in Fribourg, Switzerland where her father, Stanisław Dobrzycki, was professor of Slavonic Literatures and Languages (later he was a Professor and Rector of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań). As a child, Irena Dobrzycka therefore had opportunities to master both the English and French languages, before the family returned to a restored Poland after the First World War. She received her master’s degree in 1932 at the Adam Mickiewicz University, and from 1932 to 1938 worked as a secondary school teacher of English and French in Poznań. From 1933, she was at the same time employed as an Assistant Lecturer at the Department of English at the University. She spent the academic year 1938/1939 at the University of Bristol on a scholarship funded by the recently-opened British Council – the first scholarship of its kind awarded in Poland. We are told that she took an active part there in student life in Bristol. One eye witness reported that ‘When, as Chancellor of this University, Sir Winston Churchill, bestowed an honorary degree on President Kennedy’s father – then American Ambassador – Irena Dobrzycka played an active part in the burlesque of that same ceremony on the steps of the Victoria Rooms.’ She returned to Poznań just before the outbreak of war, but was soon forced by German resettlement policies to leave her home and take refuge in Warsaw, where she was involved in underground teaching of English. She recounted a story that indicates her teaching skills and also her cool nerve: once while she was teaching a group of 10-year-old boys, there was gunfire in the street outside and one of the boys tried to open the window to get a better look – something that might have been fatal if the Germans had come in and found the illicit schoolroom. He was restrained by another boy, who said that if he did not do as he was told, Ms Dobrzycka would not, as she had promised, let them play the humorous and competitive word games which she used to keep them quiet. These stories formed part of the Laudation pronounced when she received an honorary degreein Bristol in 1979, and are recorded in the University of Bristol Newsletter (16 August 1979). After the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, she was evacuated from the city by the Germans and found herself in Piotrków Trybunalski, where she also earned her keep by giving English lessons.

When the war ended, Professor Dobrzycka continued her academic career. In March 1945, she returned to Poznań, where she had managed to complete and submit her doctoral thesis in 1938 before leaving for Bristol. This dissertation was lost during the war, but she was awarded the degree of Ph.D. in 1945 for a dissertation entitled ‘The Writing of W.S. Maughan’. In 1946–1947, in the brief interlude before the Iron Curtain came down and put a temporary end to such contacts, she spent a year at the University of Sheffield. In the immediate post-war period, she also commuted to Toruń to teach in the English department at the Mikołaj Kopernik University, but in 1953 she was transferred to the University of Warsaw when other departments were closed. In 1956, at the beginning of the ‘thaw’ in international relations, and again in 1960, she spent several months with a scholarship in London. In 1960, she also spent the summer months visiting universities in the United States as part of ‘The Experiment in International Living.’

In 1964, on the basis of her monograph Kształtowanie się twórczości Byrona – Bohater bajroniczny a zagadnienie narodowe (= The shaping of Byron’s poetry – the Byronic hero and the national question, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich 1963) she was nominated by the Warsaw faculty council for the status of tenured docent (‘docent etatowy’), the equivalent of the habilitacja degree, or second doctorate. After this promotion, she was Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Philology between 1966 and 1968, and in 1969 was elected to represent the Faculty in the University Senate. In 1969, she was appointed professor extraordinarius, and from 1969–1970, she was deputy head, and from 1970 head of the Institute of English Studies, a position she held until 1978. She also headed the Institute’s Department of English Literature from 1971 to 1979. She was chairman of the Institute’s Academic Council from 1978–1981.

Irena Dobrzycka was a member of many scholarly societies, including the International Association of University Professors of English and the Neophilological Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In 1973, she visited four British universities – two old (Cambridge and King’s College, London) and two new (East Anglia and Sussex) – in order to assess their doctoral programmes in the context of the Doctoral School of the Institute in Warsaw. In 1979, she received a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Bristol, her Public Orator being Professor Glynne Wickham (great-grandson of William Ewart Gladstone) and a well-known scholar of Shakespeare and English drama. Irena Dobrzycka shared the degree ceremony with Walter Scheel, the ex-President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Professor Dobrzycka wrote widely about English literature, particularly the social novel and its antecedents, 19th-century melodrama, Romantic poetry, and 18th-century non-fiction satire. She published monographs on the social novels of Charles Kingsley (1955), the national themes in Byron’s poetry (1963) and the novels of Charles Dickens (1972). In addition to her research work in the field of literature, she wrote popular handbooks for learners of English – including a textbook for self-learners (1962) – which ran into many editions, and took part, for example, in the organisation in the 1970s of the annual ‘Olympiada’ competitions in knowledge of English for secondary-school pupils. She also lectured on British and American Literature to groups of school teachers, librarians, and to branches of Open Universities (Uniwersytet Powszechny).

She was a respected academic teacher, supervising more than 120 M.A. theses in Warsaw, Poznań, Łódź and Toruń. She was academic supervisor of multiple doctoral dissertations at various universities in Poland: Bronisława Bałutowa, Stefan Konderski, Grażyna Siedlecka, Andrzej Weseliński, Adam Rustowski, Teresa Sieradzka-Grymińska, Maria Bachman-Łyżwińska, Jacek Wiśniewski, Maria Jędrzejkiewicz, Hanna Mrozowska-Szubert, Elżbieta Foeller-Pituch, Maria Piusińska, and Ewa Fryska.

Her students remember her, in the words of Professor Andrzej Weseliński, as “friendly, generous and warm-hearted”; he goes on to state that “her standards were high, and so were her achievements”. After her retirement in 1980, Professor Dobrzycka was a frequent and welcome guest at the Institute, participating in social functions, attending lectures and conferences. Till the end of her life, she retained a keen mind and interest in academic matters, dying on 21 May 2007 at the age of 97.

Emma Harris