Apokryficzna apokalipsa Rzeczypospolitej, czyli jak Facies perturbatae et afflictae Reipublicae Jana Dymitra Solikowskiego przeistoczyła się w Apocalipsis Stanislai Orechovii
The Apocryphal Apocalypsis of the Republic. How Jan Dymitr Solikowski’s Facies perturbatae et afflictae Reipublicae became the Apocalipsis Stanislai Orechovii

Summary/Abstract: The subject of this study is Facies perturbatae et afflictae Reipublicae, a neo-Latin text which enjoyed huge popularity in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although correctly attributed by Jan Brożek to Jan Dymitr Solikowski – who wrote it in 1564 while serving as a secretary to the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, Sigismundus Augustus – the text was widely attributed to Stanisław Orzechowski until the late eighteenth century. The first part of the present article offers a summary of the contents of the Facies and biographical information about the author. The second part discusses the history of research on the subject and the history of the text itself, delving particularly into its manuscripts and early prints. The historic-philological investigation is summarised with the construction of stemma codicorum and a chronological index of printed editions, which includes translations into Polish and paraphrases (presented in an appendix). Third and fourth parts of the study deal with the reception of the text and fata libelli, particularly its attribution to Stanisław Orzechowski. The research was done into the biographical relations between Orzechowski and Solikowski, literary parallelisms found in their works, and iconographic themes present in the frontispiece of Orzechowski’s Quincunx and the drawings in Solikowski’s manuscripts. The protagonists of the history of reception are Jan Szczęsny Herburt, one of the leaders of 1606–1607 anti-royalist rokosz (rebellion), and Jan Szeliga, a printer co-operating with Herburt. Herburt was the first publisher of the Facies (although he did not publish the original text but a paraphrase in Old Polish). At the same time, Szeliga was responsible for almost half of all editions of the Facies, first as Herburt’s printer, and later as an independent editor. Thus, as is evident from Herburt’s foreword to his edition, a royalist allegory which glorifies the king unexpectedly emerges in the context of an anti-royalist rokosz ideology.

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