"Pan Tadeusz" jako poezja czysta. Studia i szkice o Mickiewiczu

Abstract

“Pan Tadeusz” As Pure Poetry. Studies of Mickiewicz brings together a number of studies dedicated to the leading figure in the Polish Romantic movement, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the author of the Polish national epic in twelve books of verse Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania, published in Paris in 1834. The dissertation was written by Halina Krukowska, Professor Emeritus at the University of Białystok, who represents the famous school of literary interpretation created years ago by Professor Maria Janion in Gdańsk and Warsaw. Krukowska, who has always emphasized her eastern borderland origins, has proposed her own method of interpreting Romantic poetry (Mickiewicz’s poetry included). The method tends to give prominence to the role that metaphysics, religion and borderland culture played in the development of Polish Romanticism, and accentuates its unique, eastern European character, which manifested itself in numerous references to the mystic, apophatic vision of God, in the conviction that each human being inescapably belongs to a certain “place” of origin, in the inclinations to metaphysical visions of history (messianism, millenarianism, providentialism), and in the tendency to highlight the spiritual, not psychological, dimensions of man. The studies are divided into four parts. The first concerns Mickiewicz’s early and mature works up to 1833. The second is solely dedicated to Pan Tadeusz. The third group of texts touches upon Mickiewicz’s spirituality in the context of iconoclasm and icons, apophatic theology, and mysticism (the motif of silence). The last part comprises two essays on the Romantic idea of infinity, and the very notion of Romanticism as a literary movement. The titles of the studies are: The souls’ malady in the reason’s workshop. On Mickiewicz’s ballad Tukaj, or Friendship’s Trials, The cyclic character of Mickiewicz’s Crimean Sonnets in the context of Gaston Bachelard’s conception of poetic time, “Beautiful valleys will be left to the happy ones” (On Konrad Wallenrod), The Romantic states of Mickiewicz’s existence, Pan Tadeusz as pure poetry, Mickiewicz’s “last place”, On Mickiewicz’s “I see”, Mickiewicz’s God in the context of Eastern Christianity’s apophatic theology, Mickiewicz’s choice of pictorial culture in the context of iconoclasm, Mickiewicz’s Christian spirituality, The Romantic poetry of infinity, Romanticism, or “the spirit’s salto mortale”. By setting up the Research Unit in the Literature of Enlightenment and Romanticism, inspiring the Scholarly Publishing Series “Dark Romanticism” and encouraging the creation of Chair in Philological Studies “East – West”, Professor Krukowska established in Białystok an important centre for the studies of European Romanticism. The studies collected in the present volume were written from 1977 to 2013. They all have been carefully re-edited and footnoted. As the author herself asserts: “Pan Tadeusz stems from the poet’s deep immersion in God’s Largeness, the fragment of which (in the Romantic sense of the word) is Soplicowo, Lithuania. Thus Mickiewicz’s arch-epic appeals to our spiritual need to unite fully with Being. Only the man united with Being (i.e. the man who is not ontologically disinherited) can, as the author of the Lithuanian book, feel its whole Godly beauty, its whole poetry. As the text that (on an unprecedented scale) ecstatically celebrates the beauty of Being and the poetry of life in general, Pan Tadeusz is a perfect realization of the Romantic idea of pan-poetry. Mickiewicz’s pan-poetry, as we wanted to demonstrate, has its ontological origin in God’s prototype.” (Przełożył: Jacek Partyka)