Kategoria poezji narodowej u Mickiewicza i rosyjskich słowianofilów

Abstract

The category of national poetry according to Mickiewicz and the Russian Slavophiles. There exists a close relationship between Mickiewicz’s concept of national poetry and its Slavophile counterpart. In both cases their narratives serve the struggle for domination amongst the Slavonic nations. Mickiewicz could not deny the historical fact of Russian political ascendancy. However, wishing to discredit its ethical and metaphysical implications, he deducted this fact from a lower - as compared with Poland - degree of development of the Russian spirit as part of the Slavonic spirit. This relatively one-sided, but highly effective Greater Russian spirit was perfectly embodied by Derzhavin’s Odes. Mickiewicz thought that contemporary Russian poetry - Pushkin not excepted - was less in tune with the Greater Russian spirit and, therefore, prophesied its imminent decline. Polish poetry, on the other hand, awaited a splendid future, due to its attempts to express and realize a supranational messianic promise. However, as Polish superiority derived from a fuller degree of spiritual development, Poles were to a larger extent exposed to the threat of not rising to the heights of their destiny. The Russian Slavophile literary critic and philosopher Ivan Kireyevsky shared many of Mickiewicz’s intuitions with regard to nationality and national poetry. After having discovered in Pushkin’s oeuvre the beginnings of an authentically Russian national poetry (1829), he arrived in 1845 at the conclusion that the existing achievements of Russian literature were merely due to the individual talent of authors who, in fact, imitated Western European literary models. A truly national Russian literature had yet to emerge. Meditating on the history of Polish literature that by focusing on individuality had become alienated from its Slavonic roots, Kireyevsky warned against a similar development in Russian literature.