Król-Duch jako mitopeja. Esej

Abstract

The author of this essay points to the currently dominant styles of reading King‑Spirit, as an epic, a metempsychic autobiography, whose First Rhapsody was published by Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki (1808–1849) in Paris in 1847. He was writing fragmentary parts up to the last days of his life. This work has become a legend of the most incomprehensible, extravagant or exclusive reading experience. It was considered to be a missed or (more often) impossible to conceive masterpiece. The author includes King-Spirit in the “meta-genre”, which, in his opinion, is mythopoeia. Mythopoeia tells the story of a migrating, changing individual or collective subject, who experiences changes in reality, epochs, cultures, looking for knowledge or ultimate truth. Słowacki’s poem is a radical, mystical realisation of the project of mythopoeia, whose other variants are, for example, Stanisław Staszic’s Humankind, Goethe’s Faust, Imre Madácha’s Tragedy of Man, Słowacki’s Genesis of the Spirit and Miciński’s Xiądz Faust.