Abstrakt: | The studies on works and biography of Mickiewicz I have been conducting
for almost 30 years prove that a poet, irrespective of the fact if it was formulating
Filomat legislation acts, preparation for classes in school or at the university,
writing a historical or poetical work, organising legion learning Turkish (the eleventh
foreign language) when it turned out that its knowledge could be extremely
useful in military actions against Russia, he always showed young enthusiasm if
only a patriotic context, hope for gaining independence by Poland the generation
of Romanticism dreamt of, were on the horizon. Mickiewicz always took care more
of others than himself and family, even in the case of the correction of the book of
Poezje by Stefan Garczyński, his friend, and turned out to be more scrupulous and
creative than during his own correction of Pan Tadeusz.
Because previous works on Mickiewicz, successfuly cumulated in 2000, were
characterised by definitely monographic ambitions on the one hand, and popularising
ones on the other, today, after a decade, I intend to present a reader more interested in
„the greatest Polish poet” a selection of my works written at the turn of the 20th and
21st centuries, derived from various inspirations and grouped in 5 parts: 1) Filomat
fulfillment and disappointment; 2) Motives, inspirations, phenomena; 3) Additions to
ideas, relations, silence – that is why the titles of three chapters in this part involve
the phrase „still about…”; 4) On editorial and, more specific, philological problems;
5) Polyglotism of the poet. Most often, these are the results of Poland wide and
international academic sessions in which I took part (in Cieszyn, Gdańsk, Katowice,
Ostrava, Ustroń and Vilnius), and papers presented between 1994 and 2008. In few
places I decided on a rather subjective tone and placed a short note on the circumstances
of the origin of the idea, an intriguingly designed title of the conference, sent
a series of handbooks, and prepared an academic session on the occasion of a poetic
competition for Icarus’ Wing, I was lucky to receive a special copy of Christian
ethics by Vincent Houdry (Venice 1750) with a mysterious inspiration. Revealing
the origin of the idea sometimes tells more not only about the source, but also a
final result of academic investigations of the historian of literature, especially the
literature from older times. Where the beginning part of the book title „A Word is a whole human being”. Studies and sketches about Mickiewicz comes from will
be explained in chapter 10 about poet’s silence. Although I use the wery statement
in a slightly different way than its author assumed, „work” is understood here in
a broader sense, as a synonym of activity, not only a literary one, but also as a set of
political and socio-cultural enterprises. |