Pisma rozproszone. Tom IV. Poezje rozproszone 1896-1918

Abstract

The whole oeuvre of Tadeusz Miciński (1873–1918), a classic of Young Poland literature, has not been brought together and published as a collection so far. In course books and scholarly articles, the writer–considered one of the most notable lyricists, playwrights, and novelists of the epoch–is interpreted only through the prism of his well-known texts; in fact, most of his poetry, essays and articles remain uncollected. The project financed by the National Program for the Development of Humanities (No 1aH 15 0322 83): “The Critical Edition of Tadeusz Miciński’s Uncollected Writings in Four Volumes: Essays, Lyrics, Journalism” aims to find, collect, and critically edit such writings. Volume I, including the texts written between 1896–1908, was published in 2017. Volume II, collecting the essays and articles written between 1909–1914, was published in 1918. Volume III, presenting Miciński’s writings from the period of the Great War (1914– 1918), was published in 2019. The present, and last, volume of Miciński’s Uncollected Writings offers his poetry from the period (1896–1918) (i.e. short and long poems, and dramatic fragments) with the exception of In the Darkness of Stars (1902), the only book of verse that was published during his lifetime. The poems brought together in Volume IV were composed over a long period of time, and some of them have not been republished to date. The time of the Great War, which the author spent in Russia(1914–1918), abounded with the so far unknown poems of Miciński. They were published in local press, which today is either hardly available or unavailable in Polish libraries. The volume is divided in five chronological-thematic assemblages.The first one, “Lyrical Pieces and Miscellaneous Poems,” includes the verse from the period 1896–1914 (until the outbreak of the Great War) as well as a few poems published in press in the 1890s, which did not go into In the Darkness of Stars. The second, much longer part, “From the Turn of the Century Up to the War,” collects the pieces published in press and subsequently included in the book form. We also present a series of poems “The Caucasus” (1903) and “The Tatras,” which, in a slightly altered form, went later into his debut novel Nietota. A Secret Book of the Tatras (1910). Here the reader will find several poems from different years, most of the them from 1911 (five) and from 1914 (five). The second thematic assemblage, entitled “The Poetry of the Great War Time,” does not contain longer poems that went into the third part, and features twenty fragments of different length–from short lyrical pieces [“In the Dark Glens…” 1917–1918] (a rarity at the time) to much longer poems (“Wheat and Cockle Corn,” 1917). In the course of editorial work, new poems such as “Hymn to America of the United States” (1917), “Night in Petrograd” (1917), or “By the Waters of Babylon” (1916) were discovered. Among the longer poems published once only and, therefore, considered unknown these days, the third assemblage, “Poems, Novellas, and Dramatic Fragments,” gives “Visons of Poland” (1915), “War” (1916), “Fortress” (1917), and “Wawel’s Bell… in Petrograd!” (1917). Besides, we present the Russian original and the Polish translation of the dramatic fragment “Костёр Яaнa Гусa” (1916) and two novellas: “Anahita’s Love” (1916) and “The Spirit King” (1917) (written after the Bolshevik coup). This part of the volume also includes two versions of Miciński’s famous longer poem, “The Specter of Wallenrod” (1914) (the original version in 1908).The fourth thematic assemblage brings together “Translations and Renditions” of the works by A. Amfiteatrowa, E. Verhearen, G. d’Annunzi, K. Balmont, D. Domjanić, and G. Carducci, as well as translations from Polish into Russian of the pieces that were published in “Утро России” in 1917 (the Polish anthem, “Warszawianka,” “Boże, coś Polskę,” and M. Konopnicka’s “Rota”). The whole volume ends with Annexes: Miciński’s juvenilia, i.e. his earliest poems dating back to 1891, and two works in a manuscript form: “On Pessimism,” published in a shortened version by Teresa Wróblewska in 1969, and “On the Origin of Beniowski,” edited by Jerzy Illg in 1977. The texts included in Volume IV have been prepared by Marcin Bajko, PhD; Professor Jarosław Ławski; Kamil. K. Pilichiewicz, PhD (The Łukasz Górnicki Library); and Urszula M. Pilch, PhD (The Jagiellonian University). Miciński’s texts are given multiple footnotes, which, so it is hoped, significantly facilitate a reading process. The volume opens with the Introductions by Jarosław Ławski and Urszula M. Pilch, which discuss and analyze the collected poetry of Miciński. The whole project, i.e. all four planned volumes, has been supervised by its Head, Marcin Bajko and Jarosław Ławski (Chair in Philological Studies “East-West” at the University of Białystok).