BRYKALSKA Maria

Born on 22 July 1920 in Brochów near Sochaczew; daughter of the gardener and later warehouse worker Bolesław Oprawka and Kazimiera, née Malinowska. She attended the primary school in the village of Lubanie near Nieszawa and then the Maria Konopnicka State Secondary and Grammar School in Włocławek. During the German occupation of Poland, she worked from October 1940 to mid-January 1945 as a bookkeeper in Lubanie district administration. From March to April 1945, she was a teacher at the local primary school. The same year, she started a degree in Polish philology at the University of Warsaw (UW) and graduated with a master's degree in 1951. Between 1948 and 1956 she was employed at the information and bibliography section of the University of Warsaw Library where she was involved in projects on the history of bibliography and worked on a study of Arkady Tołoczanow's (Arkady Andreyevich Tolochanov's) private library. She completed a course in information and bibliography at Poland's National Library. At the same time, she worked from 1954 on a bibliography of the contents of the periodical "Prawda" from 1881 to 1887 and 1909 to 1911 for the Institute of Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN). She was appointed a senior assistant lecturer at the Section for Scientific Documentation of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century Polish Literature (Dział Dokumentacji Naukowej Literatury Polskiej końca XIX i XX w) at IBL (which in 1966 became Pracownia Słownika Współczesnych Pisarzy Polskich – the Department for the Dictionary of Contemporary Polish Writers and then in 1968 Pracownia Dokumentacji Literatury Współczesnej – the Department for the Documentation of Contemporary Literature). She was involved in the project that created entries in biographical dictionaries of contemporary writers, while also creating bibliographies of the contents of periodicals and chronicling literary life in the People's Republic of Poland (PRL). Her own research focused on the activities of Aleksander Świętochowski, particularly his work as editor of "Prawda". In 1962, she gained a qualification in research documentation. She was a member of the team of authors compiling Słownik współczesnych pisarzy polskich (Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Polish Writers; series 1, 1963-66; series 2, 1977-80), who twice (in 1966 and 1980) received the collective prize of the Polish Academy of Sciences' First Division in Social Sciences (Wydział I Nauk Społecznych PAN). In 1971 she was awarded a doctoral degree from IBL for her thesis Aleksander Świętochowski – redaktor i wydawca „Prawdy” (Aleksander Świętochowski – editor and publisher of "Prawda") which was supervised by Dr Ewa Korzeniewska. From 1976 she was part of the editorial team working on the contemporary section of the bibliographical guidebook Pisarze polscy (Polish writers), which was being developed at IBL PAN. A manuscript was completed in 1987 but never published. She retired in 1980. In 1984 she was awarded a habilitation degree by IBL PAN for her biography of Aleksander Świętochowski.
She married the accountant Józef Brykalski; they had a son, Piotr (b. 1950), who became a doctor of psychiatry. Brykalska died on 27 June 1994 in Komorów; she is buried at the cemetery in Pęcice.