Dialog o Śląsku : o (nie)zmienności obrazu krainy i jej mieszkańców w polskich syntezach dziejów narodowych epoki zaborów : (studium historiograficzne)

Abstract

The very study constitutes an attempt to reflect on the ways of approaching the Silesian issues in Polish synthetic narrations written at the end of the Republic of Both Nations at the time of a complete loss of Polish statehood. The author aimed to both reconstruct the presence of Silesian motives in the afore-mentioned type of historical works synthetically, and recognize and capture a dynamic process of their shaping and changing. She also tried to present a specified selection of opinions on Silesia as a certain living whole, a set of presentations and explanations connected with complex relations of references, continuation, negation or transposition. In searching proper categories and research tools, she turned to the theory of dialogue and studies on intertextuality deriving from it. The work consists of five chapters. In the first, the author tries to ground her considerations in the context of an already existing historiographic tradition of researching the “Polish historical thought”, presents the theoretical assumptions, explains the conception, and discusses the empirical basis, as well as specifies the subject of research. In the second chapter, she outlines a socio-political and historiographic-cultural context accompanying the appearance of the “first text”, Historya narodu polskiego by Adam Naruszewicz, develops a detailed analysis of the very work from the perspective of selected Silesian aspects, and, finally, discusses “references” — subsequent views on Silesia included in synthetic works of the Enlightenment. In two subsequent chapters, she presents “voices” of a dialogue on Silesia heard in Romanticism and Positivism respectively in a chronological order. In each of them, she tries to show a network of dialogue relations combining subsequent “replicas” with the most important texts of the epochs in question, syntheses by Joachim Lelewel (for Romanticism) and works by the leader of Krakow school owned by Michał Bobrzyński and Józef Szujski (for post-Upraising times). The scope of considerations is expanded to monographic books at that time which to a smaller or greater extent dealt with the Silesian issues, treating them as the “providers” of the new arguments to the dialogue participants. In the fifth chapter, devoted to Neoromanticism, the author presents the first two opinions of the subsequent segment of a dialogue process, interrupted by the outbreak of the World War I, belonging to Feliks Koneczny and Józef Dąbrowski. In closing, she shows a holistic characteristic of a dialogue on Silesia in a synthetic way, and points to its substantial determinants.