Andrzej Bobkowski’s Travels and Cycle Tours

The purpose of this article is to present and analyze selected travel accounts by the Polish emigrant Andrzej Bobkowski (1913–1961). In France, in spite of the ongoing war and then the German occupation, he undertook a number of cycling and sports-tourist expeditions; his phenomenal descriptions of these journeys have become part of the Polish literary canon. Bobkowski called his travels ‘bicycle tours’ and for him they were a form of expression inextricably connected with authentic existence and personal freedom in a world of totalitarianisms. The author employs comparative and the qualitative methods (content analysis) of scholarship