Diary 1954

Diary 1954 (Pol. Dziennik 1954) is a book by Leopold Tyrmand containing his notes from the first three months of 1954.

The diary was created more than half a year after Tyrmand lost his job at Tygodnik Powszechny – along with all of the other editors – for his refusal to publish Joseph Stalin's obituary version dictated by the authorities. He was then given, like his co-workers, an unofficial print interdiction. He earned his living from accidental sources: private lessons, copy writing, and selling his stories for screenplays.

The notes were taken almost daily between 1 January and 2 April 1954, and occupied 800 pages. The last paragraph breaks off in the middle of a sentence. Tyrmand explained after years, "The last evening, tired with writing, as it often happened, I broke off the sentence intending to return to it the next day. But I never did. The next day Czytelnik offered me a contract to write Zły. Initially I was going to continue the diary, but the days passed by, suddenly full of the different circumstances and requirements."

In 1956, Tygodnik Powszechny published a fragment of the diary. After his emigration in 1965, Tyrmand deposited the diary in the editorial office of the Parisian Kultura, collecting it after four years.

Tyrmand resumed edition of his notes in 1973. Fragments were published in the London periodical Wiadomości between 1974 and 1978. The first book edition appeared in London in 1980, published by Polonia Book Fund. Introduction to the first edition included the sentence, "present book contains the entirety of the diary, unaffected by editorial considerations, moral quandaries, political necessities, social concessions." Meanwhile the cover displayed a photo of the manuscript, on which the text did not match the book's content. Notice has also been taken of English translation calques and style clumsiness. Many interlocutors of Mariusz Urbanek, author of a book Zły Tyrmand, were convinced that nearly all of the diary was created in the United States. On the other hand, Literatura Polska 1939-91 characterises this publication as an apocrypha.

It was only in 1999 that the original version of the diary, based on the notes opened to the public by Tyrmand's wife and kept at Stanford University, was issued.

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