Janusz Tazbir (5 august 1927 – 3 may 2016)

The Third-of-May Day, the anniversary of the enactment of the fi rst Polish constitution 1791, and thus the date of high importance for Polish historians, has proved extremely sad for us this year.It was on 3 May 2016 that Professor Janusz Tazbir, one of the most outstanding Polish historians, an excellent populariser of knowledge about the country's history, died at his Warsaw home.Professor Janusz Tazbir was one of the doyens of Polish historiography.He belonged to the (now severely shrinking) group of scholars who in the early 1950s faced the task not only to rebuild the foundations of Polish humanities in the aftermath of the enormous damage and losses caused by the Second World War and the subsequent years of 'reinforcement of the people's (i.e., communist) authority' but also to defend the humanistic sciences against the threat of the 'historical materialist' ideology which was brutally superimposed by the authorities of the time.Janusz Tazbir was born in 1927 in Kauszyn, in the region of Masovia.During the German occupation he did some random or seasonal jobs for living whilst pursuing intense self-instruction, which enabled him to complete his secondary-level education after 1945 with the 'Juliusz Sowacki' Grammar School in Warsaw.With his matriculation completed, he commenced his tertiary education at the Faculty of History, University of Warsaw, and obtained his MA degree there in 1950.Professor Henryk Samsonowicz, his close friend, and an outstanding history scholar himself, recollects that as a university student, Janusz Tazbir was primarily interested in the history of Polish culture, as opposed to their colleagues, who were mostly preoccupied with economic and societal processes.This focus, established for most part in his student years, has prevalently determined his later fi eld of research and the problems he tackled in his historiographic works

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