Polish Literature and Language

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POLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

POLISH LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. The "golden age" of Polish literature (1520–1620) arose out of modest medieval beginnings. Latin-writing historians (Gallus Anonymus, 1113–1115; Bishop of Cracow Wincenty Kadłubek, early thirteenth century; Jan Długosz, or Longinus, fifteenth century) produced chronicles of Polish events; churchmen wrote poetry, saints' lives, and theological and political tracts. Extant literature in Polish paints a still more modest picture. We have a Psalter translated for Queen Jadwiga (late fourteenth or early fifteenth century) and a Bible done for Queen Sophia (c. 1455); two collections of sermons (fourteenth and fifteenth centuries); a versified Legenda o świętym Aleksym (mid-fifteenth century; Legend of St. Alexis); Rozmowa Mistrza Polikarpa ze Śmiercią (late fifteenth century; Conversation of Master Polikarp with Death); Słota's didactic poem about table manners (early fifteenth century); a few secular songs and satires; some religious hymns, perhaps the oldest of which was an invocation of the mother of God ("Bogurodzica"); and apocrypha, such as the fifteenth-century Meditation on the Life of Lord Jesus. Many of these works had Latin, German, and Czech models, and there are some indications that untranslated works of Czech literature (which experienced a flourishing in the mid-fourteenth century) may have found a Polish readership.

Humanist circles began to develop in the late fifteenth century around the courts of king, magnates, and bishops, and at Cracow's university (founded 1364). The Italian political refugee and writer Filippo Buonaccorsi (Callimachus, 1437–1496) found haven at the court of Archbishop of Lviv Gregory of Sanok, before rising to become a royal secretary and tutor to the sons of King Casimir IV Jagiellończyk. One of these sons, King Sigismund I the Old (ruled 1506–1548), married an Italian (Bona Sforza) and presided over the rise of the Polish Renaissance. The Sodalitas Litteraria Vistulana, a loose grouping of humanistically trained writers, grew up around Bavarian poet Konrad Celtis (Pickel, 1459–1508), who studied in Cracow (1488–1491) and wrote of his Polish adventures in his Quattuor Libri Amorum (Four books of love) of 1502. A young Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) studied humanities and mathematics at the Cracow Academy in this period (1491–1494).

RENAISSANCE

The Polish Renaissance was neo-Latin in its first phases. Maciej of Miechów (1453 or 1457–1523) introduced Poland to the humanistic world with his Tractatus de Duabus Sarmatiis (1517;Treatise on the two Sarmatias) and Chronica Polonorum (1519; Chronicle of the Poles), as did later Marcin Kromer (c. 1512–1589) with his De Origine et Rebus Gestis Polonorum Libri XXX (1555; Thirty books on the origin and affairs of the Poles) and Polonia, Sive de Situ, Populis, Moribus, Magistratibus et Republica Regni Polonici Libri Duo (1577; Poland, or Two books on the site, peoples, customs, magistracies, and republic of the Polish kingdom). A first generation of Polish humanist poets writing in neo-Latin included Paweł of Krosno (Paulus Crosnensis, 1470–1517), Jan of Wiślica (Joannes Vislicensis, c. 1485–c. 1520), Andrzej Krzycki (Cricius, 1482–1537), Jan Dantyszek (Dantiscius, 1485–1548), Mikołaj Hussowczyk (Hussovianus, c. 1480–after 1533), and Klemens Janicki (Janicius, 1516–1543). Hussovianus, scion of a non-noble family likely from Belarus, was a client of Bishop of Płock Erazm Ciołek, whom he accompanied to Rome in 1521–522. At his patron's request, he composed an epic on the Lithuanian bison for Pope Leo X (Carmen de Statura, Feritate ac Venatione Bisontis, 1523).

Literature in Polish developed dramatically in the next generation. A precursor was the versified Aesop (1522) of Biernat of Lublin (c. 1465–c. 1529), who proclaimed reforming views on church, doctrine, and society in the years before Martin Luther. The Calvinist nobleman Mikołaj Rej (1505–1569), who proved to his countrymen that "Poles have their own, and not a 'goose's language"' (i.e., inarticulate noises) has long been considered the "father of Polish piśmiennictwo " ('writing, literacy'), if not of Polish literatura ('literature'; that honor goes to Jan Kochanowski). Among the most important works of this prolific writer were a Calvinist postil (1557; Lithuanian translation, 1600); Wizerunk własny zywota człowieka poczciwego (1558; Proper likeness of the life of the honorable man), written in imitation of the Zodiacus Vitae (early 1530s; Zodiac of life) of the Ferrara humanist Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus; and Zwierzyniec (1562; Menagerie).

The peak of the Polish Renaissance coincided largely with the reign of the last Jagiellonian king, Sigismund II Augustus (ruled 1548–1572). The humanist political thinker Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski (Fricius Modrevius, 1503–1572) was the author of the influential Commentarium de Republica Emendenda Libri Quinque (1551, 1554; Five books of commentaries on the reform of the republic), a Polish translation of which, by Cyprian Bazylik, was published by the Antitrinitarian Szymon Budny at Łosk in 1577. Łukasz Górnicki published his Dworżanin polski (Polish courtier), a translation and adaptation of Baldassare Castiglione's Il cortegiano, at Cracow in 1566. (Where Castiglione urged the perfect courtier to avoid affectation by banishing Old Tuscan words from his speech, Górnicki admonished the Polish courtier to cease peppering his Polish with Czech.)

Polish humanistic prose reached new heights in the works of Stanisław Orzechowski (1513–1566), grandson of an Orthodox priest from Red Ruthenia (Przemyśl), himself a Catholic cleric who argued against celibacy, married (in 1551), and went on to conduct polemics in support of gentry liberties and against Modrzewski and Reformation writers (he remained "Catholic"). Żywoty świętych (1579; The lives of saints) and Kazania sejmowe (1597; Sermons before the Diet) of the Jesuit court preacher Piotr Skarga (1536–1612), one of the chief architects of the Union of Brest (1596), attained the rank of best-sellers over the centuries. The standard Bible translation for Catholic Poles (first printed at Cracow in 1599) was the work of the Jesuit Jakub Wujek (1541–1597).

The poet Jan Kochanowski, proficient in several poetic genres, especially lyric and anacreontic, quickly achieved classic status and was the object of much imitation during the baroque period. His nephew Piotr Kochanowski provided the model for a Polish epic with two masterful translations, verse renderings of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (1618) and Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (first twenty-five cantos first printed at Cracow, 1799).

BAROQUE

The Rytmy, albo wiersze polskie (Rhythms, or Polish verses) of Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński (c. 1550–1581) were published posthumously in 1601. The poet's topics (the inconstancy of the temporal world, the paltriness of man subject to the whims of fortune) and stylistic inclinations (ellipses, inversions, antitheses, oxymoron) made him the precursor of a highly developed Polish baroque. Leading practitioners of a European baroque style (concettismo) in Poland included Zbigniew (c. 1628–1689) and Jan Andrzej Morsztyn (1621–1693), two members of a prominent Antitrinitarian family that produced several poets (Jan Andrzej was also a translator of Giambattista Marino and Pierre Corneille); Szymon Zimorowic (1608–1629); and the neo-Latin poet Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (Sarbievius, 1595–1640), known throughout Europe as the "Christian Horace."

The Antitrinitarian poet Wacław Potocki (1621–1696) produced an epic on the Chocim War of 1621 against the Turks, and Samuel Twardowski (c. 1600–1661), an epic on the 1648 Khmelnytsky Uprising (1660; Civil War with the Cossacks and the Tatars ). An anonymous Tasso imitator (which meant also a Piotr Kochanowski imitator) sang of the 1655 Swedish siege of Jasna Góra, the Pauline monastery at Częstochowa.

Hetman and Chancellor Stanisław Żółkiewski (1547–1620), the hussar Samuel Maskiewicz (c. 1550–c. 1640), and the soldier turned gentleman farmer Jan Chryzostom Pasek (c. 1636–1701) wrote memoirs. Sarmatian messianism found expression in the Genealogy (1633) of the Polish state by the Franciscan Wojciech Dembołęcki (1585–c. 1646), who proved (by etymology) that all languages, including and above all Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, derived from Polish. In his Psalmodia Polska (1695; Polish psalmody), Wespazjan Kochowski (1633–1700) sang in similarly messianic tones of King John III Sobieski's 1683 relief of Vienna.

The decline of the Commonwealth that began in the mid-seventeenth century was accompanied by a decline in literary culture. Many works, even of the peak of Polish baroque literature in both its European and Sarmatian variants, long remained in manuscript, often seeing print only in the nineteenth century. (A good example is the work of Wacław Potocki, an unusually prolific writer whose literary profile has only recently begun coming into focus.) This decay increased during the "Saxon Night" (the reigns of Augustus II and III of Saxony as kings of Poland, 1697–1764), a period high in quantity of literary production and low in quality. Worthy of note is one of Poland's first women writers, Elżbieta Drużbacka (c. 1698–1765), who wrote lyric, satyric, idyllic, and epic poetry (the latter based on French romances) and was prized by Polish Enlightenment reformers for the richness and purity of her language. The same reformers rather disdained the work of Father Benedykt Chmielowski (1700–1763), whose Nowe Ateny, albo Akademia wszelkiej sciencji pełna (expanded edition in four volumes, Lviv, 1754–1756; New Athens, or the academy full of every sort of science) has often been held up as the epitome of late Sarmatian backwardness (and prized by historians for its window on a worldview).

ENLIGHTENMENT

Reactions to Sarmatism began in the Saxon period. The brothers Załuski, Bishop of Cracow Andrzej Stanisław (1695–1758) and Bishop of Kiev Józef Andrzej (1702–1774), were tireless collectors of books and manuscripts; they established Poland's first (and one of Europe's first) public libraries. During the reign of Poland's last king, Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski (1764–1795), Sarmatism and Enlightenment trends continued their uneasy coexistence. The participants in the Confederation of Bar (1768–1772), which can be seen as the last defense of the Old Polish worldview or as the first modern Polish national uprising, wrote poetry in the Sarmatian baroque style. Meanwhile Bishop of Warmia Ignacy Krasicki (1735–1801) came to be regarded as the leading poet and novelist in the Enlightenment mode that was becoming dominant in Polish culture. His comic epics Myszeis (1775; Mouse-ead) and Monachomachia (c. 1778; War of the monks), together with his novel Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (1776; The adventures of Nicholas Experience), provided critiques of Sarmatian religious and political obscurantism.

See also Baroque ; Enlightenment ; Humanists and Humanism ; Kochanowski, Jan ; Kołłątaj, Hugo ; Lithuanian Literature and Language ; Poland-Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 1569–1795 ; Poland to 1569 ; Poniatowski, Stanisław II Augustus ; Reformations in Eastern Europe: Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox ; Renaissance ; Sarmatism ; Ukrainian Literature and Language .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Carpenter, Bogdana, trans. and ed. Monumenta Polonica: The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Michigan Slavic Materials, no. 31. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1989.

Krasicki, Ignacy. The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom. Translated by Thomas H. Hoisington. Evanston, Ill., 1992.

Leach, Catherine S., trans. and ed. Memoirs of the Polish Baroque: The Writings of Jan Chryzostom Pasek, a Squire of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. Berkeley, 1976.