Ruch Literacki

This article takes stock of the prose and poetry of ‘the Warsaw bohemians’ – or ‘literary gypsies’ (‘cyganeria’), as they are called by historians of Polish literature – a non-conformist literary milieu of the early 1840s. For the contemporary radical activist and literary critic Edward Dembowski they represented ‘the young generation of Warsaw writers’. That description chimed in with their own programmatic statements extolling the virtues of youth. However, as our analyses show, in the overwhelming majority of their poems youth is addressed in unmistakably elegiac tones. Its energies are spent on pursuing morally dubious projects that are impossible to accomplish. If its glories are praised to the skies, the next moment it is pushed aside or negated. The enchanted worlds cannot but give way to the real world, i.e. the realities of social and political life.

Tomasz Zan was one of the leaders of the Philomatic Association, a secret student organization that existed from 1817 to 1823 at the Imperial University of Wilno (Vilnius). This article deals with his autobiographical novel made up of letters he wrote between 1815 and 1823. As the assembled letters do not follow the author’s life in chronological order, the text has be read outside the formal categories of an autobiographical record, with due attention to the poetics of the fragment. Moreover, the textual narrator is not always a representative of the author. The occasional use of a persona suggests that the letters are not underpinned by a consistent and well-defined narrative “I”. It seems that in so far as Zan’s identity inscribed in the text appears fuzzy or disparate, its accurate reconstruction would not be possible without an analysis of the tropological system of his letters.

This is a comparative analysis of the key ideas regarding nation-building in the writ-ings of Adam Mickiewicz and Patrick Pearse, who have gone down to history as icons of the Polish and Irish national revival. In the case of Mickiewicz the article focuses on Dziady – Część III (Forefathers’ Eve – Part III), Konrad Wallenrod, Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego (Books of the Polish Nation and Poland’s Pilgrimage); the Irish materials include Pearce’s dramas The King and The Singer as well as Theobald Wolfe Tone’s ‘Speech from the Dock’. A trope common to all of them is the concept of ‘a beauti-ful, awesome voice’ / ‘a traitorous song’: literature as a mighty force that can create a community dedicated to the national cause. A comparison of passages that articulate the messianic idea indicates that, though understood by either writer in his own way, they both envision it as a catalyst turning nation-building literature into an apotheosis of martyrdom and death – a process which could be described as axiological metabolism. The article also examines the paradoxes of the projections of the myth of national unity in the work of both writers, especially in Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz and Pearse’s short story ‘In My Garden’.

The horror fiction of the Romantic Age differs considerably from its contemporary descendants. While generally associated with scary entertainment (‘playing with fear’), the Romantic Gothic often enough crossed the line to explore the depths of genuine epistemological, existential or political fears. This would not have been possible without developing its own poetics which drew its strength from a variety of sources. One of them was the speculative philosophy of history in its pessimistic and optimistic variants. They both fed the sense of horror and its literary transpositions. Moreover, they formed a positive feedback loop: anxiety over the course of history led to the use of the devices and registers of the poetics of horror, which in turn led to the amplification of the effects of the historical vision on the reader.

The aim of this article is to trace the relationship between time and dead bodies or human remains in selected works of the Romantic period featuring Poland’s legendary (pre)history, notably Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s Stara baśń ( An Ancient Tale), ‘Lech’ from Deotyma’s Polska w pieśni ( Poland in Song), Cyprian Norwid’s Wanda and Krakus, and Juliusz Słowacki’s Balladyna, Lilla Weneda and Król-Duch ( The Spirit King). As Polish state was effaced from the political map of Europe (“laid in the grave”) the Romantics sought to affirm Poland’s indelible cultural and historical continuity by blurring the hard bound-ary between past and present. Hence a new interest in all kinds of burial sites – tombs, mounds and barrows – and the human remains interred there. Their continued presence undermines simple notions of life and death.
The article examines the poetic elaborations of the idea of temporality, especially the imagery used to challenge the official narrative of Poland’s history. If the dead (con-ceived realistically or symbolically) do not cease to exist, the historiography of the victors does not have the last word. Moreover, by reanimating the dead, investing them with a bodily form and giving each of them a voice to tell their story, the Romantic writers produced a new way of history writing based on a radical revision of the relationship between past, present and future.

This article examines the reception of the féeries, French theatre productions known for their fantasy plots, lavish scenery and spectacular visuals, in the feuilletons by Zofia Węgierska, published in 1853–1869 by the magazine Biblioteka Warszawska. In her reviews of the plays and operas staged in the capital of the French Empire she tried to pinpoint those elements of the productions that were common to the Polish and the French early Romantic aesthetics. She highly appreciated the romantic fairytale magic, the clever juxtaposition of contrastive scenes and moods, historicism, metaphysics, and dazzling stage effects as long as they helped to impress upon the audience the didactic and moral message of a play. The unvarying reference points of her criticism are the plays of Alexandre Dumas père, the Polish Romantic drama, the reception of the Vien-nese romantic fairytale plays in Poland (until 1850) and the journalism of Théophile Gautier.

This article discusses Grzegorz Uzdański’s verse novel Wypiór (2021, the title is a pun on the word ‘upiór’, Pol. spectre) which is multifaceted commentary on the Romantic tradition and the ‘Romantic paradigm’, epitomized in the figure of Adam Mickiewicz transformed into a vampire. The pop-cultural frame invites the reader to pursue all kinds of links between Wypiór and the gallery of the living dead, ghosts and spectres in Mickiewicz’s stories (conceived both as characters from the past and a metaphoric projections of the Romantic poet). The article compares the references and allusions in Uzdański’s novel to Mickiewicz’s own text as well as the text of another contemporary comic horror novel, Ale razem z naszymi umarłymi ( But Not Without Our Dead) by Jacek Dehnel. The analyses, which rely on a methodological toolkit inspired by Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, offer a more accurate reading of Wypiór and highlight its place in the contemporary reception of Romanticism with its predilection for haunting, ghosts or persistent spectral presence.