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Václav Havel claims in his essays how important the structure of his play is. In this paper we will focus on the rhythm of Václav Havel's dramas as a crucial component of their structure and will analyze his plays, The Increased Difficulty of Concentration (1968) and Largo desolato (1984).
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Contemporary Czech writer Václav Vokolek is in his work inspired mostly by the world of literature, paintings and spiritual concepts, distancing his writing from any political and social reality. But he made one exception at the beginning of new millennium, in cooperation with Czech illustrator Jindřich Strašnov. Together they have created Nejsme jako my (2001), cycle of political satires with expressive illustrations, pointed against main characters of Czech post-revolutionary political scene. The aim of this contribution is to highlight this artistically-literary work, that sure has potential to speak to readers but has not got any responses or reviews ever since publishing.
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The topic of this study is the character of the false messiah – various aspects associated with the character are analysed in three contemporary Czech novels which to varying extent touch on the subgenre area of dystopia: Mondschein (2012) by Ondřej Štindl, Můj bratr Mesiáš (2017) by Martin Vopěnka, and Logoz aneb Robert Holm, marketér dánský (2019) by David Zábranský. The study focuses on literary (genre, narrative, motivic) and social (religious, spiritual, political, environmental) aspects of the (pseudo)messiah theme that are common to these novels. The analysis is based on the typology of the literary character in Daniela Hodrová’s work.
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The paper examines the relevant genological categories of factually based imaginative literature, considers various methods of its classification and proposes the notion of modular genology. The theoretical conclusions are applied to the case of Lukáš Onderčanin's book Utopia in Lenin's Garden.
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The study is focused on the novel by Daniela Kapitáňová: Samko Tále’s Cemetery Book. The goal is to analyze the moments found in the book: first, the cemetery motif, dark humour and danse macabre, then specifics of the region and its society and last the mystified narrator playing with authenticity.
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There is an indissoluble connection between Part III of Forefathers’ Eve and Vilnius where the drama unfolds. Forefathers’ Eve is a text of the city, just as the city is a text of Forefathers’ Eve.These ties between the city and Mickiewicz’s drama pose a hermeneutic and interpretational challenge for scholars studying the Romantic period. The author of the arti- cle invokes various interpretations of Vilnius, including those expressed in terms of the semiotics of the city and geopoetics. Particular inspiration for this research comes from Mieczysław Limanowski’s works in cultural studies. A geology professor and co-founder of the Reduta Theatre, he used the category of “mystery-play spirit” to present an inter- pretation of the text of Vilnius that resonates with the vision of Vilnius presented in Part III of Forefathers’ Eve. As in the historical mystery-play theatre, events unfold simultane- ously here, taking place in different places at the same time, but are bound by the linear development of the main theme: the fate of the prisoners and their martyrdom, and, in a theatrical sense through the participation of the audience/witnesses, who are conscious of events on the city’s stage.
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This is an analysis and interpretation of the themes of travel and histo- ry in articles (including translations of foreign texts) published between 1819 and 1822 on the pages of “Dziennik Wileński”, “Tygodnik Wileński” and “Wiadomości Brukowe”. It is possible to discern distinct attitudes and methods of research and writing among the authors of metahistorical (dominance of statements composed in the silence of the study) and travel (autopsy) works. The poetics of the anecdote and a predilection for accounts of exotic places were significant phenomena in Vilnius press publications. In addition, the issues of freedom and subjectivity are often addressed in travel accounts. The article also indicates literary and scientific echoes of historiographical and travel publications in the works of the Philomaths and Philarets.
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The first volume of Mickiewicz’s Poetry (Vilnius 1822) is regarded as the manifesto of Romanticism in Polish literature, although ordinarily only part of this vo- lume, namely Ballads and Romances, is taken into consideration. This article analyses the structural and thematic relationships between the three parts of the volume: the extensi- ve prose preface, the cycle of Ballads and Romances and Miscellaneous Poems. The volume as a whole is interpreted as a project and the first realisation of a new kind of Polish poetry: national through the use of folk motifs and the assumption of the widest, popular, and not exclusively elitist addressee, universal through being rooted in literary tradition from antiquity to Mickiewicz’s times. Poetry is supposed to speak about matters of importance to the nation, reviving its historical memory and bringing hope for the future, and many elements of the poetic programme and the themes of Poetry are continued in Mickiewicz’s later work. The utopian nature of the 1822 poetry programme is signalled in the subsequ- ent sections of the article. The poet assumed that the people, not the elite, formed the nucleus of the nation, and that folk imagination and creativity were the basis of national literature. Such poetry could not be created consistently if national literature in the Polish language was to grow out of the work of the people from several nations and using several languages in the pre-Partition Republic, and if it was to address itself to this multi-ethnic people. Moreover, if citizens did not have political power and representation, they were first and foremost serfs. This is why Mickiewicz’s work tends towards a “history of the no- bility”: an example would be Pan Tadeusz, where ‘the people’ refers much more clearly to the petty gentry than in 1822’s Poetry, and the accepted tradition is that of Polish literature from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, which is no longer in opposition to folk art.
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The article deals with the mythization of the geographical space of the Nowogródek region in Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances. Krzysztof Trybuś introduces into his analysis and interpretation of Mickiewicz’s ballad series the category of memory as being equivalent to imagination, thus pointing to the analogy in William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. In his analysis, Trybuś takes into account both the rhetorical tradition of memory (ars) and the epistemological one (vis). He uses the notion of roman- tic memory with the cultural studies reflections of Aleida and Jan Assmann. Writing about places of memory in Mickiewicz’s ballad series, the author of the article also distinguishes kairotic places, marked by catastrophe. Trybuś links the historical context of Lithuania during the Napoleonic wars with the issue of death, which is heavily accentuated in Bal- lads and Romances. In the conclusion, he refers polemically to Maria Żmigrodzka’s well- -established thesis of two faces of early Romanticism in Poland. In doing so, he points out the similarity between Mickiewicz’s ballad cycle and Antoni Malczewski’s Maria in the preferential treatment of the theme of death.
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The starting point of the article is the question about the possibility of treating Adam Mickiewicz’s Widowisko as a popular drama. The author analyzes the work in terms of the genre’s rules, then wonders whether its shape was influenced by Mickie- wicz’s theatrical experiences or his reading. She then argues that Widowisko, more than theatre, was inspired by Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Faust and Jan Śniadecki’s disserta- tion O pismach klasycznych i romantycznych (On classical and romantic writings), and that the work goes beyond the boundaries of both the drama genre and the Faustian convention.
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The publication of the Vilnius volume of Adam Mickiewicz’s Poetry coincides with the fading of the liberal press in Warsaw, published mainly by Bruno Ki- ciński. These circumstances prompt us to reflect on the relationship between Warsaw ‘liberalism’ and Vilnius ‘romanticism’ as being separate writing phenomena of the 1820s, albeit not isolated from each other, which emerged under different political conditions and produced specific forms of communication, conceptual frameworks and images.
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The article deals with the problematic birth of Romanticism in the United States of America. Although literary historians usually identify American Roman- ticism with Transcendentalism, originated by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 and pre- senting Edgar Allan Poe as an opposite “dark Romanticist,” abortive attempts to graft Romantic ideas and poetic diction in the US were undertaken as early as in the first and second decades of the 19th century by essayists who contributed to the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, and William Cullen Bryant, who made his literary debut in the North American Review. Among those who were impressed by the Romantic ideas coming from Europe were James Marsh, whose edition of Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection inspired Emer- son, and Richard Henry Dana, Sr., an enthusiast of Wordsworth, author of essays and reviews published in Boston literary magazines. However, all those efforts proved to be premature and, with the exception of Bryant’s poems, failed to make Romanticism signi- ficant before Poe, Hawthorne, and Emerson.
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The article is devoted to Kazimierz Brodziński’s dissertation On Elegy, published in 1822, which definitely stands out among other aesthetic writings by this author. It transpires that the convergence between this fact with the publication of Ballads and Romances is not accidental. Brodziński’s acknowledging the nature of elegy works turns out to be remarkably congruent with Adam Mickiewicz’s later, fully Romantic cre- ative practice, in which the distinctive character (and shape) of lyrical works can be clear- ly observed. It is the result of the “confrontation” of the past (memory) with the present. In many Romantic poems, as well as in larger works, e.g. Dziady, what is past becomes a living actuality. It can be said that Brodziński’s theory anticipated in some way the na- ture of Mickiewicz’s works. This is neither an accidental nor an incidental issue.
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The article discusses some aspects of the elements of the first edition of Antoni Malczewski’s Maria. It merely outlines this issue, which touches on the anthro- pology of writing and printing, on the one hand, and the history of books and printing in Poland in the early 19th century and the author’s life on the other.In the first part, the author discusses the writing of Maria, putting forward the hypothe- sis that Malczewski influenced the shape of his book. She then devotes particular attention to this verse novel’s fate on the book market and the copyright at the time. The article goes on to discuss the layout of the title page, above all, the graphic element placed on it and the footnotes closing the novel. The author’s footnotes to Maria are initially classified into several categories, with the author focusing on the way in which Malczewski used the ref- erenced bibliography and how this relates to Maria’s depicted world (historical realities).
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It is difficult to speak of friendship between Poles and Russians in these times. And yet friendly relations between intellectuals, writers, and historians run through the history of both countries. The friendship between Adam Mickiewicz and Alexander Pushkin, for example, is widely known. The fact that it ended in 1831 has to do with historical events, whose painful consequences we are feeling again right now. But Adam Mickiewicz cultivated numerous friendships with intellectuals of the time during his stay in Russia besides Pushkin, among them Peter Vyazemsky. And what better way to demonstrate mutual understanding than through translations from Polish into Russian? This question, which does not really require an answer, is the focus of the article
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This essay explores the role of The Glove (Rękawiczka), a translation of Friedrich Schiller’s 1797 narrative poem “Der Handschuh”, within Adam Mickiewicz’s Ballads and Romances (Ballady i romanse, 1822). Critics have shown various functions of The Glove, including a compositional one and a polemical one directed against the literature of Polish sentimentalism. What remains a blind spot, however, is the salient laconism of Schiller’s ballad, which Mickiewicz’s translation, despite some variations, renders very carefully. This essay argues that such a poetics of brevity corresponds with the acute ges- turality of the ballad. By rewriting a poem in 1820 that enacts the crisis of the medieval “civilization of gesture” (Jacques Le Goff) – the historical setting being sixteen-century France – Mickiewicz presents Romanticism as a space of artistic and social openness: Like the protagonist, the knight Emrod (Delorges, in Schiller’s original), who at the end throws the lady’s glove in her face and disappears forever from the court, Mickiewicz polemically refers to a symbolic order and at the same time negotiates it anew. The signi- ficance of gesture as “pure deed” (Goethe on Schiller’s The Glove) for the emergence of the Romantic ethos of the deed (czyn) in Poland, this essay concludes, has not been conc- lusively explored even two hundred years after the publication of Ballads and Romances.
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The article discusses the significance of the portrait of Tadeusz Rejtan in Book I of Pan Tadeusz, showing how Mickiewicz combines the ancient and medieval tradition associated with Cato the Younger and Jacques Delille’s Dithyramb on the Immor- tality of the Soul. Rejtan becomes an archetype of opposition to tyranny transplanted into Polish culture and the experience of the partition. Mickiewicz imbues this archetype with a distinctly metaphysical character, inspired by Plato’s philosophy, going beyond the his- torical context and towards the eternal and universal.
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The article deals with the reception of Early German Romanticism (es- pecially of Friedrich Schlegel’s concepts of progressive universal poetry and Romantic irony) in German literature, literary studies and criticism of the 1990s and early 2000s. It focuses on the implied and actual reception of early Romanticism in the works of authors such as Christian Kracht and Rainald Goetz, who are attributed to what is called pop-lit- erature [Popliteratur] in German literary studies. The article also includes an explanation of the term “Popliteratur”.
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