Despite the tormented national reality, the faith in the future redemption of Poland and the idea of change and purification gave birth in the works of the Polish romantics to the hope of salvation, of the advent of the divine kingdom on Earth. Undoubtedly an idea contributed to the birth of this optimistic vision, that was the conception of a Poland like the “Christ of the nations”, which took hold in the new mystical atmosphere of the early nineteenth century and which was combined with Christian eschatologism, revolutionary aspirations and hopes for the future redemption of history. The apocalyptic and millenarian motifs present in the Divine Comedy undeniably played a part in strengthening the messianic ideas of the romantics: the present from a fertile ground for evil and chaos, through suffering and destruction, became the privileged moment of expiation that prepared the advent of the city of God. The paper aims to analyze some motifs from Dante’s Paradise which inspired some of the most stunning pages of Polish romantic literature.

Taking as a starting point Vyacheslav Ivanov’s poem Eden – the epilogue of the 5th book of “metaphysical lyric poetry” Rosarium as well as his critical and philosophical works – the article proposes a culturological interpretation of the key topoi of the poet’s artistic thought: his poetic anthropology. The principal point in these considerations is conceptualisation of the category of paradise/Eden in Ivanov’s writings and the notion of happiness as “metaphysical and religious feeling” connected with a person’s spiritual life in its vertical dimension (relation man – three-personed God). Moreover, the article presents intertextual relationships between Ivanov’s poetry and cultural texts (St Augustine, Petrarch, and others) being the source of European understanding of the concepts: soul, memory, oblivion, paradise.