John Keats i Tadeusz Kościuszko: kultura radykalizmu

Abstract

The topic of this bilingual publication in Polish and English is the lecture given by Professor Joel J. Janicki of Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan, on 17 December 2021 at the invitation of the Faculty of Philology of the University of Białystok. Due to the coronavirus pandemic at the time, the lecture was held online in English. Prof. Janicki, born in the US, but residing and teaching in Taipei, who has Central European, and – more specifically – Polish roots, chose as the topic the issue of the links between the Polish culture with that of the English­‑speaking world. His lecture was entitled Keats and Kosciuszko: The Culture of Radicalism. This was not the speaker’s first experience with the University of Białystok and its students. On 27 April 2017, Prof. Joel J. Janicki gave a lecture entitled 1846 Year of Wonders: Francis Parkman and the Oregon Trail. Joel Joseph Janicki is currently a member of the faculty of the English Department of Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. He has taught courses in English and American Literatures, among others. He is a member of the University’s Central and East European Center where he has taught introductory courses devoted to Polish Language and Culture. His research interests include the life and writings of Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz and the life and influence of Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He has published articles on the American writers Washington Irving, Willa Cather and Sherman Alexie and the Russian writers Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevskii and Andrei Bely. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he attended St. John Kanty Elementary School, Marquette University High School and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In his junior year he had the opportunity to visit Krakow, Warsaw, Leningrad and Moscow during the Christmas season in 1972–1973 which instilled an interest in Slavic languages and cultures. He was a student at the Polonia Institute in Krakow for two years followed by one year at the Jagiellonian University where he studied the Polish and Russian languages (1978–1981). Upon his return to the US he worked for the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York as Book Manager. He continued his education in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Champaign­‑Urbana where he earned Master’s and PhD degrees. He later obtained a position as lecturer in the Department of Foreign Languages at Northern Illinois University where he taught Russian Language and Literature to undergraduates.He met his future wife, Yauling Hsieh, in Champaign. A prolific translator, she earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Champaign­‑Urbana. She also taught Chinese Language at Northern Illinois University. The couple relocated to Taipei, Taiwan where they raised two daughters, Julia and Sylvia and taught at Soochow University. Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746–1817), the embodiment of republican virtue and a national hero of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and the United States, espoused and fought for universal principles of freedom, equality and civic responsibility at the dawn of democracy. He is a genius and representative figure of the age of enlightenment and revolution. A remarkable aspect of his universal appeal is the emergence of a cult of Kosciuszko in the years 1794–1820 in Britain, the country and empire he fought against as an officer and military engineer in the American Revolutionary War. The first poems inspired by Kosciuszko among British poets arose in the 1790 s amidst an atmosphere of widespread anxiety and tension engulfing England and the European continent caused by the revolutionary events unfolding in France. The French Revolution undermined the long established authority of church and crown and elicited a strong reaction socially, politically and militarily in the conservative European monarchies in Vienna, St. Petersburg and London. Revolutionary fervor in enlightened English society gave rise to radical clubs and organizations seeking political and social reform. Their activities were largely met with a heavy­‑handed government response resulting in the arrest of leaders, followed by trials, convictions and imprisonment or exile. The present undertaking attempts to take a closer look at one of these poems, the sonnet To Kosciuszko by John Keats (1795–1821), written in December 1816. The sonnet is an early work of Keats that appeared in the first published volume of his poetic works, Poems, which made its way into print in March 1817 when the English poet was just 21. The study centers on Kosciuszko’s appeal for Keats as a poetic figure and on the particular influences on Keats that helped forge a culture of radicalism in a staunchly conservative society and shape a poetic sensibility and a political and moral outlook that created in the young Englishman an affinity for Kosciuszko and the values he embodied. Specifically, Keats’s creative relationships with three somewhat older male contemporary figures, all close compatriots of his, are examined: Keats’s mentor, Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877), the critic and publisher, Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) and the essayist and critic, William Hazlitt (1778–1830). Professor Joel J. Janicki is a scholar in the field of English and Slavic cultures and languages, specialising in Polish and Russian literature, in particular the Polish literature of the late Enlightenment and the end of the 18th century. Currently residing in Taipei.