Aldona Paczkowska and Feliks Paczkowski
The fairy tales presented on Fleeting Traditions portal come from the Folklore Archive of the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń. They belong to a rich collection of around 350 fairy tales, fables and legends, collected by participants in folklore competitions organised in the 1950s and 1960s. Among them were Aldona Paczkowska, née Dubacka, and Feliks Paczkowski, her husband’s brother – both from Włocławek. They were characterised by an excellent memory, imagination and literary ability. Their great virtue was their awareness of the value of content passed down from generation to generation and their willingness to perpetuate it. The Paczkowski family took part in competitions on three occasions and were awarded prizes by the jury for the works they submitted. They considered this to be a great honour, and in her letters to the organisers of the competitions Aldona referred to herself as the “fairy tale correspondent from Włocławek”. They were not educated, but had exceptional literary talent. The fairy tales they wrote down are characterised by fairly correct language and perfectly sketched realities of the depicted world, skilfully combined with fairy-tale fantasy. The Paczkowski family did not invent the plots themselves, but used the fairy tale stories they had heard and created their own works based on these.
The fairy tales presented on Fleeting Traditions portal come from the Folklore Archive of the Ethnographic Museum in Toruń. They belong to a rich collection of around 350 fairy tales, fables and legends, collected by participants in folklore competitions organised in the 1950s and 1960s. Among them were Aldona Paczkowska, née Dubacka, and Feliks Paczkowski, her husband’s brother – both from Włocławek. They were characterised by an excellent memory, imagination and literary ability. Their great virtue was their awareness of the value of content passed down from generation to generation and their willingness to perpetuate it. The Paczkowski family took part in competitions on three occasions and were awarded prizes by the jury for the works they submitted. They considered this to be a great honour, and in her letters to the organisers of the competitions Aldona referred to herself as the “fairy tale correspondent from Włocławek”. They were not educated, but had exceptional literary talent. The fairy tales they wrote down are characterised by fairly correct language and perfectly sketched realities of the depicted world, skilfully combined with fairy-tale fantasy. The Paczkowski family did not invent the plots themselves, but used the fairy tale stories they had heard and created their own works based on these.
Unfortunately, little is known about the biographical details of Feliks Paczkowski and Aldona Paczkowska. They both came from families of bricklayers. Feliks (1930-1997) completed primary school and one form of vocational school – he was a baker. He worked as a labourer at the Włocławek Machine and Equipment Factory ‘Wisła’. Feliks’ sister-in-law Aldona (1927-1990, née Dubacka) completed two forms of primary school and was a housewife. They both remembered most of the submitted fairy tales from their childhood. As Feliks Paczkowski recalled, they were told in the evenings by older family members, neighbours and acquaintances. Among them was uncle Józef Zimecki, born in 1887, who liked to recall the fairy tales he had heard in his youth, sometimes inventing new ones himself or improving the well-known ones. Zimecki, a bricklayer by profession, was also a nativity scene maker, he was carolling with a handmade nativity scene and presenting a nativity show of his own making.
Paczkowski liked to go fishing outside Wloclawek. There he would chat up the farmers he met and encourage them to tell the fairy tales they knew. He would take notes, and in the evenings, at home, he would write down their contents, probably adding a lot from himself, so that the fairy-tale world would be as complete as possible. Hence (as in the fairy tales written down by Aldona) the numerous descriptions in them of old social relations (e.g. cruel landowners), family relations (e.g. evil stepmothers and brothers), beliefs (e.g. in witches, strzygas), as well as the realities of everyday life. Paczkowski’s fairy tales differed from the traditional ones by introducing descriptions of the characters’ inner lives, their impressions and emotions, their mental states. This may have been the result of their familiarity with literary fiction and their desire to model their own works on it.
Neither Feliks nor Aldona, being city dwellers and coming from a working-class background, used the Kuyavian dialect. They wrote in literary Polish, weaving in dialect and jargon words, colloquial sayings and even phrases from the official language. The fairy tales are often set in a specific place (e.g. on the Hel Peninsula, on the Gopło Lake, on the Zgłowiączka River, on the road between Włocławek and Wieniec), mostly in an unspecified time (e.g. a very long time ago or ‘in times like these, which we do not know and do not remember’). The Aldona Paczkowska’s and Feliks’ Paczkowski’s fairy tales have a happy ending, sometimes with a moral or instructive punch line. Feliks, who, as he claimed, wanted to be in tune with tradition, sometimes put humorous formulas at the end of his fairy tales, e.g. ‘Two holes in the nose and it’s over’ or a proverb, e.g. ‘Where the devil won’t tempt, there a woman must’. Aldona wrote simply ‘The end’ or ‘The end of the fairy tale’. Among the 60 fairy tales submitted by the Paczkowski family for the competitions, magical fairy tales (e.g. About a Landowner who Haunted, Fairy Tale about a Bird, a Lion and a Whale, About a Poor Widow and her Five Daughters, Fairy Tale about a Fair Fellow) and novelistic tales (e.g. About a Happy Hour, About a Monster Dwarf, Fairy Tale about Bandits) dominated.
The fairy tales, although heard in Kuyavia, often came from outside the region. Aldona knew some from the German woman she served as a child, or her father told them to her, and he learned them from a priest he knew from the Bialystok area. The Paczkowski family included this information in a small number of notes, which makes it possible to trace the flow of stories to Kuyavia, confirming the thesis – well known to folklorists – of the migratory character of folk tales.
