„Pamięć serca”. Król-Duch i kwestia Armenii

Abstract

The subject matter of the study is the Armenian theme woven into The King-Spirit, which is linked both to Juliusz Słowacki’s biography and the main hero of his epos – Er Armenian. The findings of contemporary Armeniologists and Iraniologists irrefutably prove the Armenian basis of the myth of Er, the son of Armenios, quoted by Plato in his 10th book of The Republic (Politeia) and artistically transformed in Słowacki’s work (contrary to the assumptions by Polish literary scholars who considered Er’s Armenianness to be a mistake made by the French translators of The Republic). The myth’s source lies in the Armenian story of Ara the Beautiful, slightly modified under the influence of Persian (Iranian) culture and religious tradition, particularly that of Zoroastrianism. The figure of Er-Zarathustra evokes the Romantic concepts of Iranian ethnogenesis of Slavs in Słowacki’s Slavonic epic. The context of the “Iranian thesis” allows us to regard The King-Spirit not only as a monument of Latin civilisation or a reservoir of Scandinavian mythology, but also as a Romantic gate to the Orient, revealing (thanks to Plato) the forgotten tangled web of Slavonic, Iranian and Armenian prehistory. The Romantic “discernment of one’s nature” in Słowacki’s work happens through the exploration of the deepest layers of the collective memory of the Indo-Europeans (particularly Slavs) and (possibly) by searching one’s own oriental roots. In this sense, The King-Spirit becomes a record of a Romantic “memory of the heart”.