Norwid's Rzecz o wolności słowa and Mickiewicz's Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego

Abstract

This is an attempt to interpret Norwid's Rzecz o wolności słowa as a polemic with Mickiewicz's Księgi narodu polskiego i pielgrzymstwa polskiego. A Comparison of the two finds justification in the text of Norwid's poem, which includes a long passage on Mickiewicz's work in Ch. XIII. Owing to this, we can read the Rzecz differently from earlier students, first of all by bringing in the context of Norwid's polemic with Romanticism, its vision of history and its historical reflection. In referring to Mickiewicz's work in his own poem on „freedom of the word”, Norwid engaged in a dispute with a particular text, but he also extended his polemic to all literature that based its philosophy or vision of history on revolutionary and Messianic ideas. Norwid tackles Romantic problems, but he deals with them unromantically. His vision of human history is firmly rooted in the Christian tradition; it is based on knowledge of the Bible and the Fathers and it breaks with all the chiliastic and millenarian dreams which were so typical of his „great predecessors”, particularly Mickiewicz's Księgi. In Norwid's Rzecz, it is not the Polish people that is the collective subject of history: the subject of history is mankind, which forms a new community, the community of the Church, and as such strives towards its specific goal, Jesus Christ.