Romantyczna świadomość elegijna – rozprawa „O elegii” Kazimierza Brodzińskiego
Romantic Elegiac Awareness. Kazimierz Brodziński’s Treatise “On Elegy”

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims to present Kazimierz Brodziński’s views on the elegy. The author of “On Classicism and Romanticism” (publ. 1818) and “On Idyll from a Moral Point of View” (publ. 1823) is commonly regarded as a main theoretician and defender of idyll writing. Nonetheless, a careful reading of the two treatises, combined with an analysis of his thesis “On Elegy” (publ. 1822) reveals “other” Brodziński who not only doubts into the idyll’s life span at the beginning of 19th c. and also becomes an eulogist of elegiac sensitivity. In reference to the elegiac subject’s unique emotional state (the experience of instability of the world and one’s own transitoriness), the latter is defined by Brodziński’s attitude to time (connected with metaphors of vanity and melancholic consciousness of loss) and to space (which is a sensual equivalent of the subject’s emotions and attests his emptiness and loneliness in the world). Brodziński’s observations were contrasted with Friedrich Schiller’s treatise “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” (publ. 1800), which was Polish writer’s important source of inspiration, and with the tradition of “sweet melancholy” present especially in French art and literature. It might be concluded that the idyll in Brodziński’s considerations is a metaphor of vanished order and harmony whilst the elegy gives the fullest description of emotional and historical situation of the then man.

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