Młoda Polska ezoteryczna. Studia

Abstract

The present monograph is another volume summarizing the work of the research team, which since 2017 has been carrying out the project: „Young Poland: Revisions, Reinterpretations,” which aims to reread various phenomena of Polish literature from 1890 to 1918. The project is conducted jointly by the „East-West” Department of Philological Research of the Faculty of Philology of the University of Bialystok and the Department of the History of Positivist and Young Poland Literature of the Faculty of Polish Studies of the University of Bialystok. So far, research has focused on modernists’ irony, the works of Tadeusz Miciński, Wacław Berent, Sofia Casanova, and the esotericism of Young Poland. It is to this last issue that the book is devoted. As part of the research, on May 17, 2022, the Fourth Conference of the series „Young Poland: Revisions, Reinterpretations” was held on the topic: „Esoteric Young Poland. Metamorphoses of Poetics, Ideas, and Personalities.” The researchers addressed the following issues: –– Esoteric, occult, and theosophical inspirations of literature and art of the Young Poland period –– Poetics of the work vs. modernist implantations and metamorphoses of esoteric ideas –– European and world esotericism and Young Poland: a mutual transmissionof ideas –– Imagery, vision, symbolism, and esoteric inspirations –– Great and forgotten esoteric writers in Polish culture –– Central and Eastern European migrations and transfers of esoteric thought –– The experience of esoteric transgression versus the moment of creation and the poetics of the Young Poland writings –– Philosophical, historical-cultural, and sociological contexts of Young Poland’s experiments with esotericism –– Visual arts, theater, music of the era, and the ideas of esotericism. Twenty-one researchers from 9 Polish centers attended the Conference. As the participants emphasized, it was a fascinating confrontation of different ideas about esotericism, occultism, and spiritualism present in the literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The participants of the session were the originators and executors of the grant of the National Program for the Development of the Humanities realized at the University of Gdansk, „Polish culture towards Western esoteric philosophy in the years 1890–1939”. Very different methodological approaches to this issue are presented. The present volume groups the texts into three chapters: I. Sources, Ideas, Forms; II. Interpretations; III. Individuals, Works, Reception. The book was edited by Dr. Marcin Bajko, University of Bialystok, a researcher of Polish literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; Prof. Jarosław Ławski, head of the Department of Philological Research „East-West” at the University of Bialystok; and Dr Urszula M. Pilch, a researcher of Young Poland Literature from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. The participants of the project unanimously emphasized the high level of reflection. Surprisingly, this was the first research on esoteric imagination. Therefore, context for the entire cultural-civilizational formation.