Wyobraźnia prawna romantyka. Przypadek Dominika Magnuszewskiego

Abstract

The article investigates the role of the experience of university studies in the intellectual biography of Dominik Magnuszewski (1809–1845). As a student of the Faculty of Law and Administration at the University of Warsaw, he got politically involved and then interrupted his education in order to participate in the November Uprising. This contributed to the fact that Magnuszewski’s studies are usually viewed through the prism of his political activity while students are perceived as rebels against tyranny. What escapes attention, however, is the fact that studies aroused the young Magnuszewski intellectually, provided him with historical knowledge, equipped him with thought faculties for describing the historical process, and provided impulses for his imagination in literary works. The influence of university legal education is evident in his best-known work, Miss Urszula’s Revenge (1838), written in Galicia, where the writer took refuge after the fall of the November Uprising. The issue of interrupted work and cognitive activities is reflected in Magnuszewski’s memoir Tea, published shortly before the writer’s death in Lviv’s “Dziennik Mód Paryskich” (“Paris Fashion Diaries”). The sketch is filled with bitterness about the November Uprising resulting from a sense of loss of intellectual or creative potential, a tone which is hardly present in most of the narratives concerning the Uprising. Such an experience was shared by a large group of Polish students of that time, and proved to be a recurrent one in the nineteenth century and later.