library & the world 

It has been one of those leading dreams of modernity to make a complete collection of the world. Grandiose institutions have been built to host such collections: of art, of butterflies, of ethnic artefacts gathered by imperial expeditions. My collection of images and stories is private and non-hegemonic, yet it has its own aspirations of being exhaustive, at least to such a degree that each country (the term is treated freely, in its cultural and natural, rather than political sense) has something on my website: a poem, a story, a traditional performance to represent it. Of course, I couldn't travel to each and every one of them. Also my library is not a prodigiously extensive one; it is just a private collection squatting between my flat in Kraków and in my storage space in Leiden as it waits for better opportunities. Yet I like to consider myself a polyglot book collector and the possession of just a couple of rare books boosts my ego. This is why I care to write about the books I possess, and those that merely passed through my hands, and those that I offered to a foundation supporting countryside libraries in Eastern Poland. For a collection is a flow, the items must go to leave the place for the careful, thoughtful accumulation of better ones. To have better books is one of major, lasting aspirations orientating my life. In a sense, it has been an epic journey since my bookless childhood to my present-day relative abundance, to my dreams of glorious mahogany shelves of tomorrow. 
I love to read books as I travel, deepening the meaning of my destinations. Any reading anticipates a journey to come. These are two interwoven passions of my life. This is also where the private meets the professional; it is a long time since I've started to mix both and to make my destiny of World Literature scholar, often stretching my interests beyond the frames of what ought to be academically acceptable.
Such a vision of World Literature is a typical example of modern work-in-progress. Just a glimpse brings about another glimpse, and another, till an intricate, detailed image of the world starts to emerge in its full complexity, yet never to reach full clarity. In fact, I'm also interested in ignorance, in the cultural frontiers of knowledge. I depart from the deep shadow of Eastern Europe, my peripheral origin where the world and worldly aspirations are still treated as inelegant, unwomanly presumption. Yet any human subjectivity moves in determined cultural horizon. Even an Oxonian or Harvardian erudition puts some parts of the world in the limelight, while other places remain in the shadow. As I move between my academic locations, I can observe countries, cultures, and languages suddenly jump as if out of nowhere. 
Global completeness is a fractal, and that implies a growing density of perception, a better understanding of local literatures and all those languages I eternally go on learning as I see war movies shortly before midnight. Book by book, my aspiration is to descend to tiny identities, ethnic groups, places few people ever heard about. I would not hear about many of them myself, were it not for this project; this is how my global traveller literary encyclopaedia is enriching me in the first place. I wouldn't mind, however, becoming an intellectual travelebrity, yet I guess it takes more social skills than just reading books.
Anyway, it is all about experiencing the world, being one with it. Reading books is a way. But there are more: also art, cinematographic narrations, and music, although in the last domain I am the least expert and have lesser means of providing commentary or analysis of any sort. Nonetheless, one day, my English permitting, I would like to write on the sublime of an Armenian song. 
I collect countries of which I know something, where I stayed for a considerable time, on which I have published academically. But the part I consider the most interesting and authentic is where I search for countries, peoples, languages, and cultures of which I initially had nothing but the name. Is their existence as minor, insignificant, and meaningless as it seems? They might have been silenced, for one reason or another, by some power controlling the flow of information, deciding what is important and interesting, and what is not. They might also be silenced by our sheer ignorance, our inability of going as far as it would be necessary to meet them. As I scratch the world, there are more and more things that appear, and the understanding I reach often concerns more than just the peoples and cultures that cease to seem minor.
And I must say this website is a fruit of a genuine passion; I'm often experiencing what psychologists call the flow, unable to count the hours spent on choosing and editing my pictures, writing my texts, thinking about books I had read in more or less distant past, gathering the scarce and chaotic information on the world that I might have received on different occasions since my first fascination with the world as a child. Long before the slightest sparkle of awareness that reading about Sinuhe the Egyptian I delve not only in ancient Egypt, but also put my hands on my first Finnish classic. 
This is how, searching for a way of spending my life, I decided to make a complete collection of the world through my own real and imaginary expeditions. Just like other people collect postal stamps from all over the world; I did it as a child. Now I collect images and narrations. That's all. I would like to mention that all photos presented on this website are mine; I did not scavenge them in repositories. To visualise the places where I have never been, I tried to take pictures of some reality samples that exist in all sorts of collections, such as botanical gardens or zoos. Also, the translations of poems or literary quotations are mine, unless a source or the name of a translator is indicated.