„Weltliteratur” a poezja narodowa. Komparatystyczne dylematy w krytyce literackiej Maurycego Mochnackiego
Weltliteratur and National Poetry. Comparative Tension and Dilemmas in the Literary Criticism of Maurycy Mochnacki

Summary/Abstract: The article concerns the beginning of Polish comparative literature in the Romantic era. Maurycy Mochnacki was the first outstanding theoretician of Romanticism in Poland. He gained his fame as a literary critic. In his articles and reviews he compared Polish Romantic literature to its British, German, French, and Spanish counterparts. He discussed literary works in the context of the concept of a nation. The nation understood ethnically was fundamental to his comparative thought. He was an original and influential thinker in Poland. He propagated German variety of Romanticism as such influenced by the Schlegel brothers. The aesthetics, which he tried to impose on romantic art, was founded on a common postulate of originality and national cultural tradition. Hence, it was a variety, an individual character, and the richness of works based on particular national foundations that decided on the value of modern Romantic literature. A certain paradox can be observed as ethnocentric postulates of Mochnacki headed eventually for the approval of multicultural European civilisation. Poland was to become one of the national cultures, expressive, different, and fully original. It is a trend characteristic for the first phase of the development of Romanticism in Poland; a trend toward an open culture, coexisting equally with other national cultures. A sum of nationalistic values of varied works from different countries constitutes a condition for the development of modern civilisation based on the richness of varieties of regional cultures.

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