“Being's fated shade”

Abstract

The situation of the Polish late Romantic poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid in Germany gives reason for optimism. It makes it possible to believe that our life as readers is not fixed once and for all, requiring us to endlessly adhere to established canons. Norwid’s unusual position in the social and literary milieus of nineteenth-century Poland and Europe corresponds to this dual movement of romanticizing and making common. After the defeat of the January Uprising, the modern culture of the backward “country” created a cordon sanitaire around political Romanticism. Jerzy Jedlicki, a sociologist of the Polish intelligentsia, has shown how the Positivist generation successfully canonized Romantic poetry while simultaneously locking it in a gilded cage. Norwid’s theoretical writings repeat, consciously or not, the theses of the German Romantics so accurately that it would be a pity to stop at comparing them to the originals from the early nineteenth century.