Kazimiera Szczuka talks about the late Prof. Maria Janion – a humanistic visionary, a revolutionary scholar of Romanticism, and a modest “maestra” in the eyes of her students.

The article presents the work of Polish poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid in the context of writers born in 1821 (Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky). The author compares Flowers of Evil to Vade mecum of Polish poet. Such a comparision reveals the innovation of Norwid’s form, but this innovation is accompanied by traditional ideas. This traditionalism is evident as well in poet’s dramatic works. The author tries to answer the question why Norwid’s plays have never been successful on stage which is the case of Pierścień Wielkiej Damy ( A Ring of a Geat Lady). The play is very well constructed, but its ending can raise doubts concerning a psychological probability. The play’s main faults are poet’s hermetic language and a verse form: a blank verse inspired by Shakespeare and difficult to present on stage in Polish language.

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 article traces Ukrainian and foreign linguists’ views on the concept from the standpoint of the linguo-cultural approach to its study; correlations of linguo-cultural and artistic (poetic) concepts are characterized; it is stated that the poetic concept of love/romantic love belongs to the dominant and determining existential motivators of human behaviour. It was revealed that in S. Zhadan’s poetic image of the world, complexes of hierarchical sensory values are built, which form the basis of the author’s choice, his personal views on the inner world and the models of behaviour within it. A set of individually motivated values and virtues models a generalized image of the concept of love/romantic love, in which the intentions and psycho-emotional sphere of the lyrical Self, its internal reflections, are accumulated. It has been established that the contexts in the author’s idiostyle, where we observe the use of intensifiers of the poetic concept of love/romantic love for the objectification of the positive-evaluative psycho-emotional states of the lyrical Self (lexemes of happiness, joy, satisfaction, affection, bliss, pleasure, portrait strokes, details of a beloved woman, etc.), are single. At the same time, we trace the dominance of the objectifiers of the analyzed artistic concept through the prism of negative-evaluative psycho-emotional manifestations of the lyrical Self, the use of direct or figurative designations of the concept of love/romantic love as an extinguished feeling, experience, suffering, misunderstanding between lovers; as well as through the prism of the gender opposition she-he, the emotional and axiological opposition smoke-ray, the contrasting axiological reactions of lovers, the negative self-esteem of the lyrical Self, etc.

In his article titled ‘Rzut oka na ścieżkę, którą poszedłem’ [A look back at the path I have taken], published in 1832, the twenty-year old Józef Ignacy Kraszewski named a few novelists he thought worth imitating. Among them was the author of Don Quixote, “a man with an intimate knowledge of the human heart, a great investigator, and an exquisite painter”. His masterpiece was “a small collection of essays”, a treasure house of major literary forms for all European writers that came after him. Unexpectedly, however, in the last paragraph of his feuilleton Kraszewski declares he is not interested in following Cervantes because in his writing practice he makes a point of not imitating anybody. “Good or bad”, he concludes, “I am content with myself and with what I write.” I am doing my myself. Yet, if the article is put side by side with some extracts from Don Quixote shows that his demonstrative rejection of literary models does not include the legacy of Cervantes. So, in the end, it is no more than a tongue-in-cheek declaration by a young writer. After all, the novel entitled Pan Walery he is about to write, as it is announced in the article, will be a Cervantes throwback. Its unconventional form (what with interleaved, contrapuntal narrative technique, fragmentary narratives, experiment-ing with hybridity and improvisation) is in fact a literary game with Don Quixote and an ironic appendix to Cervantes' inquiry into the nature of imitatio.

In his lecture on Adam Asnyk’s poetry delivered in 1896 Jan Kasprowicz came up with the term endymionism to refer to a relatively small portion of the poet’s work characterized by a tone of extravagant egotism and narcissism. Exemplary for this extravaganza was, according to Kasprowicz, the poem ‘Endymion’. It belongs to a sequence of poems voicing the poet’s trauma after the suppression of the 1863–1864 January Uprising, and is closely connected with the ‘A Dream of the Tombs’, his most opaque and depressive poem. In the Polish literary tradition – from Słowacki’s calling Krasiński the Endymion of poetry, through Norwid and Faleński to a number of Young Poland’s poets (Rydel, Wyspiański, and Lange to mention but a few) – the figure of Endymion marked a situation of the poet being misunderstood or flouted by critics and readers. But with Asnyk’s ‘Endymion’, who, despite the appearance of a lonely dreamer is in fact a guardian of the tombs of heroes who fell in an unequal fight, this mythological figure acquired a new meaning. It became a symbol of loyalty and a noble idealism making no concessions to mundane pragmatism. In the following decades endymionism of that kind would often blend into Parnassianism, a poetic movement committed to the idea of art independent of all practical concerns and obligations.

This is a deconstructive reading of Juliusz Słowacki's Lilla Weneda, focusing on Ślaz, an enigmatic character usually marginalized in interpretations of this quasi-historical Romantic drama. Drawing on Professor Marta Piwińska's study of ‘Lilla Weneda’ in Dramat polski: Interpretacje (2001), this article explores the gaps and fissures in Słowacki's text. While complementing her analysis with a number of alternative readings, this article also uses deconstruction to challenge some of the points that are embedded in the traditional reception of the drama.

The display of affection in romantic relationships and its concomitants still require more scientific attention. Despite some studies addressing the topic of affection display, the literature does not provide a psychometrically reliable self-descriptive tool to measure this construct. Therefore, we conducted three studies among Polish adults to develop and validate a psychological tool for comprehensively identifying and measuring the display of emotional affection. Study 1 ( N = 894) aimed to develop and validate the Public and Private Romantic Display of Affection Scale (PPRDAS). It proved to be a valid psychological scale, as the theoretically assumed structure was supported by the results of the empirical analysis. Study 2 ( N = 343) confirmed the convergence validity of the PPRDAS using items of emotional expression from the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1989). In Study 3 ( N = 204 couples), we further verified the external validity of the PPRDAS using an assessment of affection displayed by one's partner in the relationship. Individuals’ self-estimates of their private and public displays of affection were confirmed by their romantic partners. In all studies, display of feelings was positively correlated with sexual and relationship satisfaction. Negative correlations with age and the duration of the romantic relationship were also observed.

On 31 July 1834 Juliusz Słowacki in the company of the Wodziński family set off from Geneva on a tour of Switzerland. He completed the first leg of journey on the same day in Bex, a village to the south‑east of Lac Leman. The following day the party visited Bex's famous salt mine and Słowacki wrote a laconic account of their excursion to the bowels of the earth in a letter to his mother. With the help of contemporary travel guides and the accounts of other travelers it is possible to fill the details of that trip. After exiting the mine, the party made their way south to Martigny.

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.

This article deals with Fryderyk Chopin's juvenilia and the occasional verse dedicated to him by his his relatives and friends. Extraordinarily diverse in tone and nature (versified happy birthday and nameday messages, friendship book entries, humorous and partying verse), they offer unexpected insights into various aspects of the composer's biography and his participation in the literary culture of his epoch, especially the more private occasions and celebrations.

The article examines the relationship between the lyrics and prose of Mieczysław Romanowski, the most talented poet of the last generation of the Romantics, and the work of other contributors of the weekly magazine Dziennik Literacki, published in Lwów between 1852 and 1870. Although their concerns and poetics have a lot in common, the high tone of Romanowski’s patriotic art is distinctly his own. In this article the analysis of his poetry is complemented by an examination of his essays and other writings which contain his views on contemporary social issues.

Whereas Wincenty Pol’s topographical verse has usually been viewed as an expression of a ‘sentimental geography’, this article proposes a new reading of a well-known poem A Song about Our Land by Wincenty Pol in terms of ‘imagined geography’, a key term of an approach inspired by geopoetics and postcolonial studies. ‘Imagined geography’ refers to a poetic map, i.e. travelogue laced with motifs from the repository of national heritage. Its images, reshaped by the writer’s imagination, form an ideologically charged whole in which an emotive sense of place or scenery (‘touching the heart’) uncovers a complex cultural stratigraphy of the ‘imagined geography’. In the light of this approach, based on the insights of geopoetics, Wincenty Pol’s poem can be treated as textual representation of a map of the real and the symbolic territory of Poland.

Artykuł ma na celu analizę problematyki związanej z człowiekiem, jego pochodzeniem i zróżnicowaniem fizycznym i kulturowym w wyobrażeniach autorów „Biblioteki Warszawskiej” w latach 1841–1864. Badany okres to epoka przed darwinowskim przełomem w naukach przyrodniczych, gdy antropologia dopiero wyodrębniła się z historii naturalnej i nadal była obszarem badawczym o zakresie niedoprecyzowanym. Jednocześnie był to czas dominacji idei romantycznych, które wpływały także na teksty o ambicjach naukowych.

This article attempts to follow the dynamic process of body communication between the characters of Juliusz Słowacki's Samuel Zborowski (1845, published 1903). An analysis of some passages at the beginning of the drama and in the penultimate act indicates that in the world of the drama the body functions as a medium and body language is at least as important as the spoken word; or, to be more precise, the two types of communication complement one another. In the encounter between Eolion and the Maiden the bodies act as repositories of spiritual memory (a key idea of Słowacki's Genesian philosophy) and can trigger the process of anamnesis, which combines elements of heterosexual eroticism and the affective touch of physical interaction. Moreover, the ensuing scene of judgment hints at a nostalgic relationship between the spirit and the body, the latter acting as a guarantor of a coherent identity, though to some extent undermined by the new model of polyphonic identity. Finally, these scenes are analyzed from the point of view of the performative-persuasive functions of the body.

This article takes a closer look at Juliusz Słowacki's poetic drama Ksiądz Marek ( Father Marek) from the perspective of its links and affinities with some of the prophetic books of the Bible. A comparison of the text of the drama with parallel passages of the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Ezekiel in the Jakub Wujek Bible throws into sharp relief the prophetic-visionary characterization of the title hero (whose real-life prototype the Franciscan friar Marek Jandołowicz was the charismatic leader of the Bar Confederation) as well as other dramatis personae (especially Klemens Kosakowski). Comparing parallel passages not only brings to light Słowacki's use of Old Testament imagery but also reveals a multilevel embedment of the drama in the biblical vision of God's work in the world. It seems that this aspect of Słowacki's creative art has not been fully appreciated in the critical readings of the drama. His relationship with the Bible should be treated as something more fundamental than a an indicator of his religious faith and, also, as a respectful and critical commitment to a narrative model of ageless relevance.

This article examines the position of Cervantes' Don Quixote in the intertextual network of Juliusz Słowacki' digressive poems, closely bound up with Schlegel's conception of Romantic irony. The article analyzes in turn direct references to Don Quixote; the use by the Polish poet, often with an ironic twist, of Cervantes' narrative strategies; the influence of Cervantes on the creation of the world of the poems (not least their central characters) and on Słowacki's extensive use of parabasis in all its varieties – from authorial commentaries and addresses to the reader, through characters who step out of their role to speak to the reader, to the foregrounding of the problems involved in the act of reading – to highlight and disrupt the illusion of fictional truth. The analysis shows that the Spanish classic was in many ways Słowacki's literary model and an aesthetic inspiration.

This article is a study of the memoirs, letters and articles written by Ryszard Berwiński after he moved to Constantinople to join Michał Czajkowski’s Cossack regiment of the Ottoman army fighting Russia in the Crimean War (1853–1856) until his death in 1879. Its primary aim is the reconstruction and a critical appraisal of Berwiński’s notion of histor-ical relations and affinities between Poland and Turkey. With its manifest partiality and propagandistic agenda (he presents the Ottoman Empire as a friend and ally that could help Poland in its struggle for independence), Berwiński’s narrative is an exemplary case of Romantic history-writing. He tries wholeheartedly to level off the all too obvious differences between the political life and institutions of the two countries. Nor does not shy away from the clash-of-civilizations problem that would make sustainable co- operation between Poland and Turkey illusory. His argument is two-pronged. First, he pieces together a sound historical argument to deconstruct the myth of Poland as the bulwark of Christianity in the East, and, secondly, he builds up a myth of 'righteous Turkey' which, like Poland, has been the victim of the predatory West (with modernizing Russia presumably the new member of the club). In effect, the old differences and animosities are trumped by a new myth – with a strong emotional and moral appeal – according to which Poland and Turkey are partners because they share the same fate. Berwiński’s eye-opening mission made hardly any ripple, it remains an intriguing, if largely forgotten, contribution to the 19th-century Polish political thought. This article brings it back from obscurity with the suggestion that relations with Turkey – the only neighbour of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that neither participated in nor re-cognized the partitions – still remain an insufficiently researched subject.

This analysis and interpretation of the poem ‘Upiór’ (Spectre) by Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz concerns itself primarily with the ‘figures of collective imaginarium’ both in his work and that of his followers. Used as an interpretative frame, the figure of the Spectre is used to highlight the role of Rymkiewicz and other poets inspired by him as the ‘posthumous’ condition. The label implies that a new community still look back to figures of Romantic fiction for an ideal reference point and hangout sign. It is also worth noting that items picked up in the romantic storage room undergo a though ideological and political face-lift. A closer look at the literary strategies employed in ‘Upiór’ leads to the conclusion that although Rymkiewicz offers us Romanticism simplified, its seductive force is undiminished, and so are the consequences. In this sense the metaphoric pre-sentation of Rymkiewicz as a Spectre communing with the living in the ceremony of Dziady can help us to better understanding of the poet’s impact not only on literature but also on the broad sphere of public imagination.

This article deals with Makryna, a forgotten drama in five acts and a prologue pub-lished in 1929 by Antoni Waśkowski. The analysis focuses on the drama’s intertextual dialogue with the history, literature and mythology of Polish Romanticism and the mod-ernist reception of those issues in Stanisław Wyspiański’s Legion (1901). The article takes to task the critical consensus that sees Waśkowski as a second-rank epigone of Romanti-cism and the Young Poland movement. In fact, it argues, Makryna challenges the re-ceived historiosophic vision of Poland’s history embodied in the work of, among others, Stanisław Wyspiański, Waśkowski’s literary master. The author of Makryna is uncom-promising in his denunciation of the 19th-century revolutionary movements and some aspects of the Polish Romantic culture, especially the messianic commitment of ‘national prophets’ like Makryna Mieczysławska, Juliusz Słowacki (the poem Rozmowa z Matką Makryną Mieczysławską [ A Conversation with Mother Makryna Mieczysławska]), Adam Mickiewicz, Andrzej Towiański.

In his introduction to the German translation of Norwid's Vade-mecum Hans Robert Jauss calls the work of the Polish poet a lasting challenge to German poetry. This essay attempts to show the ways in which Norwid’s further reception could help re-evaluate German assessments of their own Romantic tradition. For instance, the ironic undermining of the value of work, both creative and physical, in Norwid’s ‘Irony’ can be used as a tell-tale clue for the pursuit of similar intima-tions in the writings of early German Romantics, especially the barely noticed ironic undertones of their representations of labour economics. Furthermore, the adoption of the newly-developed concept of a political and economic Romanticism for the critical study of Norwid leads to the discovery of an unexpected theoretical coherence of his oeuvre, which in effect (let it be made absolutely clear) loses nothing of its heterogeneity and dialogic nature. The irony generated by the habitus of Norwid’s crypto-parabases (a technique which is a distinctive feature of his dramas) reveals the productive role of time in this mode of poetic representation, the time of work and the time of great projects, and conjure up the jeering specter of eternity.

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 is contains a new interpretation of the subject and symbolic meaning as well as a reappraisal of Tymon Niesiołowski’s two pastel paintings inspired by Juliusz Słowacki’s poem Król-Duch (The Spirit King). Crucial to the revised reading of the painting Złotogłów (Asphodel) is the conflation of the statue of Perun (the Slavic god of war) with Popiel (legendary king of Poland) and elements of Stanisław Wyspiański’s design of the St Stanislaus stained glass window in Wawel Cathedral, i.e. an intertextual link between Perun’s curse and the curse cast by Bishop Stanislaus of Szczepanów on the King. The subject of the other painting is now identified as the moment of incarnation of the Spirit King in King Bolesław the Bold and his descent on earth.

After moving to Italy in 1856, Teofil Lenartowicz, inspired by the great Italian art and supported by the best Florentine artists of the time Giovanni Dupré and Enrico Pazzi, began studying sculpture. Lenartowicz’s sculptures were always connected with literature: his work shows howone influenced the other. It is no accident that his style as a sculptor has been called ‘poetic’ by the critics. The Polish immigrant was fascinated by the Italian Renaissance, and especially by the art of Lorenzo Ghiberti. At the same time, he never forgot about Polish folklore, which played a significant role in his artistic vision. One of the most impressive examples of this intersection of influences is the bas-relief The Holy Workers, complemented by a poem bearing the same name.