Chapter 4 - Romanticism

Summary

In this constellation on Polish Romanticism, Zbigniew Majchrowski argues that messianic Romanticism became a language of consolation that gave hope and promise of freedom and, at the same time, turned out to be a language of collective violence against individualist existential projects. And as Włodzimierz Szturc adds, this negative dialectic was a fertile ground for one of the most important topics in the Polish drama and theatre, that of death and history, which can only transcend the real decline of states, nations and their cultures in the process of abstracting them, as will be evidenced in the works of many Polish playwrights and directors inhabiting other critical constellations in the volume. He argues that understanding the rights and standing of the peasantry in contrast to the szlachta (nobility) reveals forms of national affiliation and patriotism and the problems presented in cultural nostalgia or sublimation of the past.