Sfinks Słowiański I Mumia Polska (Slavic Sphinx and Polish Mummy)

H-Poland Jędrzejewski on Rudaś-Grodzka, 'Sfinks słowiański i mumia polska'

Review published on Monday, December 14, 2020

Monika Rudaś-Grodzka. Sfinks słowiański i mumia polska. Warsaw: Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2013. Maps. 392 pp. 27 złoty (paper), ISBN 978-83-61750-32-1.

Reviewed by Tomasz Jędrzejewski (Warsaw University) Published on H-Poland (December, 2020) Commissioned by Anna Muller (University of Michigan - Dearborn)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53177

Rereading Polish Romantic Slavdom

Interest in Slavic history (histories), culture(s), and literature(s) increased among Polish scholars, critics, and poets after the partition of Poland in 1795. In the last quarter of the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth, political nonexistence was compensated by the question of whether Slavs had come to the attention of European thinkers and writers. The famous fourth chapter of Johann Gotfried Herder’s Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind( Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit [1784-91]) gave an impulse to Romantic philosophy of Slavic history. Polish poets and critics became zealous heirs of Herder’s theory. How did they use this heritage? How did the Slavic idea evolve in Polish post-partition literature? These are the problems Monika Rudaś-Grodzka discusses in her Sfinks słowiański i mumia polska (Slavic sphinx and Polish mummy).

The book concerns not only the Slavic issue but also Slavdom within the context of Polishness and the construction of the nation. The author begins with the assertion that these two ideas—Slavdom and Polishness—shaped Polish Romantic literature. Rudaś-Grodzka describes the beginnings of this identity-shaping process. Romanticism is treated here not as a limited period in the history of literature but rather as a model of national culture existing up to the present. The author shows how and why Polish common identity based on Romantic ideas arouse and survived to our time.

Sfinks słowiański i mumia polska consists of two parts. The first, “The Slavic utopia, or awakening to sleep,” is dedicated to the Slavic idea before the November uprising. The author depicts early Romantic interest in Slavic cultures, beliefs, myths, and languages. Such interest can be traced in the writings of scholars and critics like Maurycy Mochnacki (see, for example, the chapter “The Concept of the nation by Maurycy Mochnacki: Narcissistic character of the Polish nation”) or prominent poets like Józef Bohdan Zaleski (see the chapter “A frail bond: On the Polish-Ukrainian unity in the Dumkas of Józef Bohdan Zaleski”). The major problem Rudaś-Grodzka discusses in this part is the symbolic colonization of eastern lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As she points out, Polish Romantic poets and critics glorified, in the name of Slavic brotherhood, the eastern “wild” landscapes and the people inhabiting these regions. At that time the myth of eastern lands as the heart and soul of Polish culture had been crystallizing. But this admiration failed to meet the emerging national consciousness of Belarussians and Ukrainian people (see the chapter “On

Polish-Ukrainian friendship”).

In part 2, “The Slavic atopia, or how to save Europe,” the author describes the way participants of the so-called Great Emigration after the collapse of the 1830-31 insurrection raised the problem of Polishness and Slavdom. Her analysis leads to the conclusion that they used the Slavic idea to get Europe to focus on the Polish question. They continued the pre-uprising tendency to link Slavdom with Polishness (see the chapter “Copernicus in the moral world: The Slavic myth and Messianism in the writings of Kazimierz Brodziński”). Although other Slavs—Russians, Czechs, and Ukrainians—were presented as fraternal nations, Adam Mickiewicz and other writers considered these nations as inferior (see the chapter “The invention of the nation in Paris lectures”). The Slavic mission in history, the concept inherited from Herder, was replaced by the idea of the Polish Messianic role in history. The approach to the Slavic issue in the 1830s and 1840s was a more radical and much more politicized version of the Slavic idea from the start of Polish Romanticism.

Rudaś-Grodzka bases her analysis on a wide range of material. She has made great use of literary and journalistic sources. The time span she covers is also impressive, as the book begins with early Romantic articles and treaties (Kazimierz Brodziński and Zorian Dołęga Chodakowski) and ends in the conclusion with Mickiewicz’s lectures in Collège de France (1840-44). She puts these texts, declarations, and manifestos into broader European contexts, as she often refers to other Slavic literatures. Brodziński’s, Mochnacki’s, and Mickiewicz’s visions of the “Slavic continent” were strictly polonocentric.

One of Rudaś-Grodzka’s most important achievements is modernizing scientific discourse on Polish Romantic conceptions of Slavdom in relation to the national issue. On the one hand, many literary texts discussed in this book are well known. But on the other, and this is much more important, for the first time these problems are comprehensively presented from the perspective of gender studies, postcolonial studies, political philosophy, memory studies, and psychoanalysis. Thus the monograph can be treated as a modern rereading of crucial questions of Polish Romantic identity. For instance, the innovative and convincing interpretation of Polish adaptations of the manifestos of other Slavic literatures is very interesting. The translation of the poem “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” is an example of appropriation and entrapment of text, which only in the Polish version became allegedly truly Slavic (see the chapter “On translations of ‘Ziewonia’ writers”).

Rudaś-Grodzka claims that Polish Romantic poets and critics were haunted by two phantasmas: a great and heroic Slavic past, perceived and described as monumental and sacred but distant in time; and a Polish national resurrectio, which also was supposed to be glorious. The key is that the present does not belong to either the monumental past or the upcoming splendid future. Being among these two visions invoked the feeling of greatness, but mingled with an inferiority complex, caused by political nonexistence. The titleSfinks słowiański i mumia polska, taken from Cyprian Norwid’s drama Cleopatra and Caesar (written in 1872 but not published until 1904), refers to the specific state of Polish national consciousness: Romantic writers still dreamed of distant and vague Slavic origins and were looking forward to resurrecting the mummy.

Thanks to the author we can trace Slavic themes and ideas from the late Enlightenment to late Romanticism. The book shows the evolution of Slavdom and national issues for nearly half of a century. Of course, it is impossible to take into account all those who constructed Slavic/national

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Jędrzejewski on Rudaś-Grodzka, 'Sfinks słowiański i mumia polska'. H-Poland. 12-14-2020. https://networks.h-net.org/node/9669/reviews/6969988/j%C4%99drzejewski-rudas%CC%81-grodzka-sfinks-s%C5%82owian%CC%81ski- i-mumia-polska Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Poland discourse, since the topic was taken up in lots of literary works. Hence, the material had to be limited to some characteristic examples. However, surprisingly Juliusz Słowacki is almost absent in Rudaś- Grodzka’s narrative (she gives an explanation of his exclusion on page 40). His specific approach to Polish-Ukrainian relations (for example, inSalomea’s Silver Dream [1844]) could have been a counterweight to Slavic conceptions of other poets and critics. But this oversight does not overshadow Rudaś-Grodzka’s profound interpretations of numerous Romantic texts. Sfinks słowiański i mumia polska is one of the most important books concerning the Romantic construction of national identity in relation to Slavdom. It can also be seen as the next step in revising these problems after Niesamowita Słowiańszczyzna (The uncanny Slavdom) (2006) by Maria Janion.

Citation: Tomasz Jędrzejewski. Review of Rudaś-Grodzka, Monika, Sfinks słowiański i mumia polska. H-Poland, H-Net Reviews. December,URL: 2020. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53177

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.