Ruch Literacki

This article examines the origins and the early decades of the history of the feuilleton in Poland and in France. A comparative analysis shows that the career of this journalistic genre is closely connected with the rise of Romanticism. Both its formal characteristic as well as its hybrid topicality established the feuilleton as an emblematic example of the Romantic poetic. The feuilleton owes its success to the contemporary vogue for commingling literary and journalistic discourses as well as the impact of Romantic writers whose opinion columns became a regular feature of many newspapers.

This article offers a new reading of the complex, multidimensional, palimpsest identity of the eponymous hero of The King Spirit. Intended to be a total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), Juliusz Słowacki’s epic poem remains unfi nished, in a number of versions that are driven by two impulses, a centrifugal force reducing the poem to a string of inchoate fragments and a centripetal counterforce working for the poem’s unity. The same vectors seem to exert a permanent tension on the central character of the poem, a complex web of relations between body and soul, individual and universal consciousness, boundless and limited knowledge, the bright light of revelation and the inadequacy of words, and, last not least, between inspiration, memory and imagination. The peculiar construction of the ‘I’ in The King Spirit may also be seen as an attempt to relinquish the aesthetic mode of existence for the religious one (as described by Søren Kierkegaard). The poem could then be read as a dramatic record of that transition.

This article examines some aspects of a broader theme indicated in the title with respect to the diptych Tyrtaeus: A Tragedy and Behind the Scenes: A Fantastic Tale. While the present analysis is based on the fi ndings of earlier critics, it develops various parallels suggested by the use of musical motifs in Norwid’s twin dramas. Those associations act as an aid to a better understanding of the differences between the attitudes and ideas presented in the plays. Moreover, by indirectly marking the contrasts of truth and falsehood, they hold the key to the moral interpretation of the plays. The overall pattern of the musical references and associations in Tyrtaeus and Behind the Scenes appears to refl ect Norwid’s organic philosophy and his idea of creative originality. Finally, the purported pushing of Tyrtaeus off a cliff, an episode symbolizing the rejection of the right path, is analyzed along two similar poetic images of Norwid’s, Aesop’s fall into an abyss (On Freedom of Speech) and the hurling of Chopin’s piano out of the window (‘Chopin’s Piano’).

This is the first study of Comrade October, the only drama in the oeuvre of Kazimierz Wierzyński (1894–1969). Written in 1950, it was not published until 1992. The article traces the origins of the play and assigns it to the tradition of dystopian fi ction (as exemplifi ed primarily by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. A close reading of the structure of the play (the characters, the plot and its temporal structure, etc.) reveals the originality of Wierzyński’s approach and the links between Comrade October and the poetry he wrote after the war in exile.

Without question Tadeusz Nowak reached the height of his poetic powers in a series of poems he called psalms (Psalms for Home Use, 1959; Psalms, 1971; and New Psalms, 1978). Although they form a distinctive group with common characteristics, it is hard to see what could possibly connect them with the lofty verses of the Book of Psalms. Having said that it can be argued that they belong to a Polish tradition of psalms developed by Kochanowski, Kochowski and Krasiński. The Polish psalms come in two varieties, those with sweeping visions of national history and identity, and the homely, or more personal, in focus and tone. Nowak rarely mentions the grand themes, yet when he does so his utterances are pregnant with meaning (though with no touch of the messianic fervour typical of the Polish psalms). His Psalms for Home Use are decidedly ‘homely’ in the sense of being personal and private (even autobiographical), and because they exhibit a mind of the common people from the country. If there is any connection between Nowak’s Psalms and their Biblical prototype it is maintained not so much by the occasional literary allusion as by the casting of the characters in the poems in the role of modern psalmists. Like King David, they know they are sinners, and that knowledge imparts to their ‘psalms’ the candidness of a cry from the depth.

This article presents the results of a genealogical and biographical archive search to collect reliable evidence (chiefl y birth certifi cates) and reconstruct Maria Konopnicka’s family tree on as broad as a scale as possible, inclusive of both the agnatic and cognitive lines (with the exception of data available from offi cial heraldry guides). On the strength of the newly obtained data we may now introduce some corrections into the established version of Maria Konopnicka’s biography and identify a number of persons from Maria Konopnicka’s circle of friends, acquaintances and correspondents.