Czym jest romantyzm: dzieło, prąd, epoka. Problemy periodyzacji romantyzmu

Abstract

The author attempts a synthetic analysis of the term „Romanticism.” He specifically considers its Polish and Russian realizations. As the researcher states, the problem is already at the level of defining what Romanticism is, not its distinguishing features. Thus, in the rich array of literary terms, such historical, literary terms as current (also called current or direction) and period, or literary epoch, are quite widely accepted. The former is a narrower concept. An epoch is a very elaborate construct, within the boundaries of which there can be various currents, not infrequently opposing ones, so it has a multicurrent character, as a rule, with the possibility of the dominance of one of them, which gives the name to the entire epoch, as is the case with Romanticism. When it is a long-lived current, its characteristics evolve and go through different phases; treating it developmentally and evolutionarily is necessary. The current is, therefore, a category of historical poetics. The problem becomes even more complicated when we consider the catalog of proposed distinctive features of Romanticism (different for each culture), the issue of pre-Romanticism (its existence and features), and the „incommensurability of the range of concepts” in such cultures as Polish, German, Russian, English.