"It is not you who must learn civilization from other nations…" : Adam Mickiewicz on modernity and modern Western civilization - MONIKA STANKIEWICZ-KOPEĆ (Autor) (2017)
http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.RHE.5.114492
Oryginalny artykuł naukowy
The aim of the present work is to recall the attitude towards modernity in Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), the greatest poet and thinker of Polish Romanticism. First of all, emigration writings by Mickiewicz, created in the thirties and forties of the 19th century were taken into account, in which the poet enclosed his reflections on modernity and Western civilization combined with historiosophic thought both on Polish history, the current situation and the future: The Book of the Polish Pilgrims (Paris, 1832); Dresden Forefathers’ Eve (Dresden 1832), constituting the Polish literary canon, the article O ludziach rozsądnych i ludziach szalonych published anonymously in the Paris ‘Pielgrzym Polski’ (1833, N°. 8); Pan Tadeusz (Paris, 1834) – an epic poem recognized as ‘the Polish national epic’ and Paris lectures – a series of lectures by Mickiewicz provided from 22 December 1840 to 28 May 1844 at the Paris Collège de France. Polish Romanticism was born out of painful disappointment with the Enlightenment, rationalism and modernity. Simultaneously, the relationship between the Polish Romanticism and modernity is not simple. Polish Romanticism emerged as a kind of ‘weave of modernization trends and at the same time, radical critique of modernization and apology of tradition’. Also, the attitude of Adam Mickiewicz to the question of civilization was not disambivalent. Moreover, it constituted part of a wider reflection on the attitude towards the Enlightenment model of cognition and this paper is a synthesis of the state of Polish research on the title problem and the related contexts and historiosophical issues.
Keywords: nauki o kulturze i religii