„Najciemniejszy poemat”. Norwidowska lektura Króla-Ducha

Abstract

The article is devoted to a specific interpretation of Juliusz Słowacki’s King-Spirit in a series of lectures given by Cyprian Norwid between 7 April and 12 May 1860 in the Polish Reading Room in Paris. The specificity of this interpretation lies in the fact that Norwid does not reconstruct Słowacki’s views, but incorporates his poem into his own system of thought, his own axiology derived from Catholicism, reinterpreting the senses contained there and adding new meanings relating to history (as a constant struggle between the selfish “I” and the Christian “non-I”), politics (especially the negative role in history of Russia as the despotic state of the tsars), religion (the timeless role of the Saviour) and eschatology (the responsibility of contemporaries for the future fate of the world). It is an example of reading, on the one hand, polemical in relation to Słowacki’s genesian philosophy, on the other hand, approving of the genius of the author and his work, which is in a positive sense the “darkest poem”, both as a work open to updating interpretations and as a determinant of the evolution of history towards Salvation.