Studia o Królu-Duchu Juliusza Słowackiego

Abstract

The present volume contains a collection of studies devoted to one of the most significant literary works of the Polish Romantic period: the poem King-Spirit (also variously translated as ‘The Spirit King’ or ‘King the Spirit’) by Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849). Its First Rhapsody was published in Paris in 1847. The poet worked on various manuscript versions of the subsequent rhapsodies until his death. Editors of the twentieth-century publications of the poem were free to choose one manuscript version over another. The poem does not readily lend itself to interpretation, not least because of its fragmentary nature. Masterfully written using the ottava rima, it is a metempsychic epic of successive incarnations through history of Er the Armenian, the poem’s mystical protagonist. The first academic conference ever to be devoted entirely to this particular poem was held in Białystok on 6–7 May, 2016 to commemorate the 170th anniversary (1847–2017) of the first publication of the First Rhapsody. The conference was titled “The poem King-Spirit by Juliusz Słowacki. Text – literary history – interpretations – comparative contexts”. The sessions took place at the Łukasz Górnicki Library. The event was organised by the ‘East-West’ Chair of Language and Literature Studies; Faculty of Philology, University of Białystok; Section of Non-literary Texts and Occasional Literature of the Department of Comparative Studies; Faculty of Polish Studies at Warsaw University; Head Office of the Adam Mickiewicz Literary Society; Łukasz Górnicki Podlasie Library in Białystok. The organising committee was headed by Prof. Jarosław Ławski (University of Białystok), and the research committee by Prof. Halina Krukowska (University of Białystok). Participants in the conference discussed the following research topics: – New readings of ‘parts’ and ‘the whole’ of King-Spirit; – The history of its publications and interpretations from 1847 to the present day..; – The poem in comparative contexts; – King-Spirit against the background of Central and Eastern European literatures; – Visual and inter-disciplinary artistic representations and interactions with the poem; – The genre traditions of and in King-Spirit; – Philosophical, hermetic, cultural, and religious contexts of the poem; – Aesthetics of the poem: symbol, myth, stigma, stanzaic prosody, etc.; – Intertextuality and auto-intertextuality of the poem; – King-Spirit as a formula of the Polish and European identity. The conference was attended by 40 researchers from Poland and the Netherlands, most of whom subsequently submitted papers for publication. Some of the papers have been published in the philological journal Bibliotekarz Podlaski (No. 4/2017). The papers collected in this book are divided into three chapters: I. Interpretations (the chapter contains overall analyses of the work); II. Symbols, motifs, ideas (the chapter contains analyses of selected elements of the poem’s aesthetics); III. Text/texts; reception (textual analysis, literary reception, and onstage interpretation of the work). The collection has been edited by: Prof. Michał Kuziak – a specialist on the interpretation of Romantic literature from Warsaw University; Prof. Jarosław Ławski – Head of the ‘East-West’ Chair of Language and Literature Studies of the University of Białystok.