Czy Maciej Stryjkowski napisał treny dla Zygmunta Augusta?
Did Maciej Stryjkowski write threnodies for Sigismund Augustus?

Certainties and possibilia

Author(s): Aleksandra Oszczęda
Subject(s): Cultural history, Modern Age, Recent History (1900 till today), 16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century, Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919), Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Present Times (2010 - today), History of Art
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Maciej Stryjkowski; Sigismund II Augustus; Grzegorz Chodkiewicz; Cyprian Bazylik; Paweł Secygniowski; funeral poetry; epitaph; Renaissance autobiography
Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to answer the question raised in the title. Its starting point is the marginal note in the autobiography of Maciej Stryjkowski. Enumerating his early works, the chronicler mentioned writing poems commemorating the last Jagiellonian. He called the poems “the threnodies about the death of the king Sigismund Augustus”. Contemporary bibliographies consider the work lost or question truthfulness of Stryjkowski’s declaration. The author of the article reconstructs the history of the unknown funeralium, using methods of philological and typographic analysis, assesses literary competences of the poet and points to the large fragment of his other work as a relic of the lost “Threnodies”. The almost 100-verse fragment of Goniec Cnoty has been juxtaposed with its historical-literary background. It consists of the epitaph for the hetman Chodkiewicz, written by Stryjkowski shortly after 1572, and native poems commemorating the last Jagiellonian dynasts. That work differs definitely from the 16th century Latin humanistic poetry, based on ancient genres and content themes. Specific characteristics of Polish commemorative poems can be indicated in the part of Goniec Cnoty dedicated to Sigismund Augustus, in which the king’s biography intertwines with praise of his achievements, prayer and thought of impermanent greatness of the Earth’s powers. The conclusion of the article contains a thesis identifying that fragment as the remnant of a today unknown Stryjkowski’s funeral work.

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