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Died 12 November 2000, Kraków, Poland | ||
Janina Turek, (born November 21, 1921 - died November 12, 2000 in Kraków, Poland) the author of one of the longest life accounts, known as factology.
Contents
Biography
Her mother, Marianna Gąsiorska, was 42 when Janina was born. She was taking care of the household. Janina's father, Teofil Gurtler, was a city office worker. He made extra income by giving drawing classes. He was copying many established and popular Polish oil painters such as Jacek Malczewski, Józef Chełmoński, Bronisława Rychter Janowska. Janina attended public boarding schools for girls in Kraków. At that time Poland had a single-sex public education system. Her good results were often getting rewarded with books of which reading and analysis soon became Janina's greatest passion. During the Second World War and the times of occupation she was greatly disappointed by having the Kraków Public Library closed down by Nazi Germans. The war did not allow her to take high school graduation exams. Similarly, her dream of studying pharmacology was impeded by the reality of the war. Janina Turek lived with her family on Słoneczna street (today's Bolesław Prus street). After getting married to Czesław Turek in November 1941 in Norbertanek's Monastery in Kraków/Salwator, the newly married moved to an apartment on Moniuszki street. In February 1943 Gestapo arrested Janina's husband. At the time, she was in her 5th month of pregnancy. After being taken to the local jail on Montelupich street, Janina's husband was deported to the Nazi German concentration camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the same year, Janina's father was relocated to an apartment nr 6 on Parkowa street in Podgórze Podgórze, where she lived until her death in 2000). Due to the war, she had to share her apartment with other tenants. In 1943 she gave birth to her son Lesław. Despite harsh conditions and poverty Janina never gave up her commitment to reading and writing. In 1943 she began the work of her life or what can be called factography of her everyday life. It has been a highly meticulous and detailed account of the events in her everyday life scrupulously penned down in accordance to several, self-establshed rules. This work was continued over next 57 until only few hours before her death in 2000. Her only brother Ignacy died in 1945. The same year her husband Czesław came back from the concentration camp. In 1947 she gave birth to her second child, a son Jerzy and in 1951 a daughter Ewa. After getting divorced in 1958 she gets employed as first a shop assistant in a local grocery store, then an office worker at a post office and lastly as a secretary. Her life is strongly connected to the city of Kraków.
Work and legacy
Janina Turek was not associated with any literary organization or political movement. Thus, her work can be regarded as related to art brut and outsider art in which aesthetic and artistic practices evolve outside of the boundaries established by conventional and mainstream tendencies in art and cultural production, often in a complete solitude. During her life, Turek's work was kept secret. Only after her death the family discovered the extensive legacy she left behind. This legacy comprises 745 notebooks, with 410.000 consistently annotated and categorized facts from the author's everyday life. Janina Turek divided her life into 33 categories. Each entry was accompanied by a date, name of the day, number and color signifying the category that the entry belonged to. All of the entries are summarized monthly and yearly. Each year has a specific color that is repeated after a 10-year cycle. Each notebook has a signature, number and subnumber. The idea for keeping such a detailed account of the everyday life did not come up all of a sudden. Since 1939 Janina Turek was carrying on a written account of her life entitled "Notebook, rather Diary" (in Polish it is "pamiętnik, raczej dziennik" where 'pamiętnik' means a notebook for one's memories whereas 'dziennik' refers to a daily log of events). Already in 1939 Turek wrote about her concerns about an inability to register on paper all that she would like to memorize and preserve. Four years later she began working on her opus magnum. Among many other aspects of everyday life, in her account Janina Turek recorded 15.786 meals with a detailed description of all ingredients, 84.523 persons noticed unintentionally, 23.397 people spontaneously encountered, 36.822 visitors, 1.922 people with whom she arranged meetings, 38.196 phone calls, 44.453 received gifts, 26.683 gifts with particular notes (i.e. a field flower, one orange), 3.517 books and magazines, 70.042 films and TV programs.