Stanisław Brzozowski: lettore di Leopardi
Stanisław Brzozowski: A Reader of Leopardi

Summary/Abstract: Polish philosopher Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911) spent the last five years of his life almost entirely in Italy (in Nervi and in Florence). The article traces back the chronology of his encounter with Italian culture, also explaining his idea of culture. In particular, his reading of Giacomo Leopardi is examined. Leopardi had been known in Poland since the 1880s, mainly through Edward Porębowicz’s translation of his poems, but Brzozowski in all probability first read him in Nervi in 1907. Subsequently, he mentioned Leopardi a few times in his own writings. These references are highly significant as they offer an original interpretation, which is not influenced by the ‘existentialist’ reading dominant at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead, Brzozowski foregrounds other aspects of Leopardi’s philosophy, including his connection with Italian history and culture of the past (Brzozowski considered Leopardi’s demystifying urge interwoven with patriotic feelings to be a recommendable model for the moral renewal of Poland), the materialist and ‘pre-communist’ element, and the enigmatic juxtaposition of the figure of Leopardi and that of the Buddha. In the article, I compare these insights with other contemporaneous and prior readings of Leopardi (von Meysenbug, De Sanctis, Labriola, and Croce) in order to show that some of Brzozowski’s intuitions anticipated interpretations of Leopardi proposed by intellectuals in the following decades (from Rensi to Cioran). Brzozowski’s readings of Leopardi are retraced on the basis of the Polish philosopher’s correspondence, his published works, unpublished manuscripts and notes and by consulting the check-out log book of the Gabinetto di Lettura Vieusseux in Florence.

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