Adam Mickiewicz w recepcji Iwana Franki

Abstract

This article discusses the various, ambiguous and contradictory reception of A. Mickiewicz by Ukrainian writer and critic Ivan Franko – poetic (allusive and reminiscent), translational, critical-literary, comparative, psychological, pseudo-publishing, as well as typological poetic echoes and a typology of poetic explorations, Franko’s position towards Mickiewicz’s reburial (in Krakow 1890). In different years (1895–1896, 1899, 1907, 1910, 1913) Franko made many poetic translations from Mickiewicz. Of these translations, the finest are those made in 1895–1896, 1899 and 1907, the peak of Franko’s work. In his article Adam Mickiewicz in Ruthenian Literature (in Polish, 1885) Franko traced the emergence of translations of some of the Polish poet’s works into Ukrainian and encouraged Ukrainian writers to more actively tame his work. This article is very sympathetic to Mickiewicz’s poetry, which, according to Franko, sowed „healthy seeds” in many generations of the Ukrainian people. This admission is the exact opposite of what Franko would later write in his article Ein Dichter des Verrathes. In the preface to a separate edition of Shevchenko’s poem Перебендя (Lviv 1889) Franko argued that the central character of this work was influenced, in his opinion, by the poet’s images, especially those created by Mickiewicz in the third part of his drama Dziady (Wielka Improwizacja). Franko published a very flattering review New edition of Mickiewicz’s works (in Polish, 1893) of the publication of the poet’s works in four volumes with numerous footnotes, explanations and bibliographic compilations by Dr. Henryk Biegeleisen (Lviv 1893).In his treatise From the secrets of poetic creativity (1898–1899), based on recent and up-to-date publications in the field of the latest psychology in aesthetics – the works of Wilhelm Wundt, Max Dessoir, Moritz Benedikt, Isidor Sadger on Grilparzer – Franko combined the old positivist principle (scholarship, which for the positivists was mainly limited to sociology, cultural studies and historical sciences) with the new modernist principle (aesthetic analysis based on the achievements of psychology) and gave his own examples of this literary approach based on the materials of the poetic classics (Shevchenko, Heine, Mickiewicz). Franko published Mickiewicz’s letter Do przyjaciół galicyjskich (Lwów 1903) in his own Ukrainian translation, with his long preface and detailed article An Attempt at Analysis. Unlike Franko’s previous studies of Mickiewicz, which were literary and mostly laudatory, written with reverence for the Polish genius (with the exception of Ein Dichter des Verrathes), this historical and political Attempt at Analysis is truly analytical, thoughtful, and thus quite critical and well-reasoned. Franko published a historical drama by an unknown author, Wielka utrata (Lviv 1914) as if it were „a genius work by Adam Mickiewicz”. The book includes Franko’s compilation of Mickiewicz’s biography and a selection of the Polish poet’s poems in the publisher’s own Ukrainian translation. On the basis of newspaper articles that were previously not in the field of view of researchers of Ivan Franko’s life and works, Ye. Nakhlik managed to clarify that Franko presented a copy of his edition to Greek Catholic Metropolitan An drey Sheptytsky at the grand opening of the first Ukrainian National Museum in Galicia on December 13, 1913, the feast day of St. Andrew the Apostle (the First Appointed), a saint of the Catholic and Orthodox Church, and the very name day of the Metropolitan, the founder of the Museum. In their lyrical, often existential reflections, Pushkin, Mickiewicz and Shevchenko resorted to decentering (in postmodern terminology) or the unmasking of acquired cultural attitudes, or basically their civic attitudes, with personal touches. At the same time, both Mickiewicz and Shevchenko refrained from making public the most blatant poetic deconstruction of their own image of the prophet, which was widely accepted by national public opinion, because such a publication would deconstruct that image. In Franko’s case, on the other hand, this decentration becomes surprisingly unique: it acquires a previously unknown tension, the highest degree of expression, inner conflict, split, special drama and even tragedy, and the writer brings all this to light, making it a public fact, albeit somewhat veiled by the artistic form, of his life and the Ukrainian literary process.