MAYENOWA Maria Renata

Born on 1 December 1908[Date of birth according to documents belonging to M.R. Mayenowa reproduced in the volume "Obecność" [Presence], Białystok 2006] in Bialystok; daughter of the bookkeeper Benjamin-Lejb Gurewicz, and Szejna née Barasz. She and her family were in Kharkiv during the First World War. She then returned to Bialystok, where she attended the Polish-language Dawid Druskin Humanities Secondary School between 1922 and 1927. From 1927, she studied Polish philology at the Stefan Batory University (USB) in Wilno (Vilnius). After graduating with a master's degree in 1932, she taught Polish at the Jewish Central Education Committee Secondary School in Wilno until 1936/37. She qualified as a middle school teacher in 1935. At the same time, she continued her studies in Polish philology and humanities methodology. She married the businessman and engineer Jefim Kapłan, who was most probably murdered in 1941 by Germans. She published her first scholarly essay, W sprawie tendencji w powieści realistycznej (On tendencies in realist novels), in 1937 (as: Rachela Kapłanowa) in the edited volume Prace ofiarowane Kazimierzowi Wóycickiemu (Works dedicated to Kazimierz Wóycicki). She was awarded a doctorate from USB in May 1939 for her thesis „Wesele” Stanisława Wyspiańskiego. Problemy kompozycji (Stanisław Wyspiański's The Wedding: Aspects of composition), which was supervised by Prof. Manfred Kridl. Following the outbreak of World War II and during the existence of the Republic of the Lithuania and then the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, she was until June 1941 an assistant at the Chair of Polish Philology at the University of Vilnius. She published articles in "Prawda Wileńska" (1941, as: R. Kapłanowa). During the German occupation, she went into hiding using forged documents on the estate of Antonia Czeżowska and Tadeusz Czeżowski in Hryhororwice in the Bracław region. In August 1944, she married the actor, theatre director and later radio play author, radio journalist and expert in radio theatre Józef Mayen. They were in hiding together in Miory in Belarus; during this period, he used the name Julian Józef Szadziewicz. After the war, she initially worked as a librarian at the Municipal Library in Bialystok. Between 1946 and 1949, she and her husband, then employed at the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, were in Prague, where she became acquainted with the works of the structuralist Prague School. From autumn 1948, she was involved in establishing the Institute of Literary Research (IBL) in Warsaw, where in 1949 she became head of the Department of Artistic Language (from 1951 the Department of the History of Language and Literary Theory and from 1955 the Section for Literary Theory and Literary Language); from 1957, she was also deputy director of research at IBL, which had since joined the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). She developed the concept for the work on the Słownik polszczyzny XVI wieku (Dictionary of sixteenth-century Polish language; it was published from 1966) and for the Słownik pojęć teoretycznoliterackich (Dictionary of concepts in literary theory; published from 1950), becoming editor-in-chief on both projects from 1949. The latter was transformed into the multi-volume edition Poetyka. Zarys encyklopedyczny (Poetics: An encyclopaedic overview; she served as editor in chief between 1956 and 1968). Between 1950 and 1958, she was a member of the editorial committee of the leading journal "Pamiętnik Literacki", where she established the section Zagadnienia języka artystycznego (Aspects of artistic language). From 1952, she served on the Scientific Council of IBL. She was a member of the editorial committees of the publication series Biblioteka Pisarzów Polskich (Library of Polish Writers; sub-series B where from 1953 to 1972 she was editor-in-chief; she established the guidelines for publishing Old-Polish texts, Zasady wydawania tekstów staropolskich) and of the Słownik języka Adama Mickiewicza (Dictionary of the language of Adam Mickiewicz) from 1954 (vols 1-5: N-O, 1962-67). In 1954, she was made associate professor. That year, she began lecturing at the University of Warsaw (UW), while from 1957 she was employed at the university's Chair of Literary Theory. In 1959, she initiated a project at IBL that created a register of medieval manuscripts featuring literary content. She was involved in promoting research on artistic language and editorial work, as well as founding Polish research on structures of coherent texts. Between 1960 and 1968, she was a member of the editorial committee of the IBL publication series Historia i Teoria Literatury (Literary History and Theory; sub-series B: Teoria Literatury [Literary Theory]). She was in the United States in 1961/62 on a Ford Foundation scholarship. Between 1962 and 1968, she coordinated the Teoria literatury (Literary theory) section of the literary yearbook "Rocznik Literacki". She was appointed to the Committee on Polish Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1966. With the discrimination of persons of Jewish origin that followed the events of March 1968 in Poland, she resigned as deputy research director of IBL in July of that year and lost her job at UW. She remained in her post as head of the Centre for the History of Language and Literary Forms at the Institute (in 1971 it became the Department of Theoretical Poetics and Literary Language). Between 1968 and 1972, she served on the editorial committee of the publication series Z Dziejów Form Artystycznych w Literaturze Polskiej (On the history of artistic forms in Polish literature), which was published by the Chair of Literary Theory at UW and by IBL. During the 1971/72 academic year, she was a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. She was appointed full professor in 1976. In 1978, she was appointed head of the editorial committee of the project to publish Jan Kochanowski's complete works, Dzieła wszystkie. Following her retirement in 1980, she continued to conduct research and editorial work at IBL. She remained a member of the Scientific Council of IBL and the Committee on Polish Literary Research at PAN. In 1982, she received the prize of the New York-based Alfred Jurzykowski Foundation. She was awarded the Gold Cross of Merit in 1954. She died on 7 May 1988 in Warsaw, where she is buried in the Catholic section of the Orthodox Cemetery in the city's Wola district.