„The Inventory of Piedmont Estates”, or the Poems of Wacław Potocki about the Landowner's Condition

Abstract

The paper presents some selected poems by Wacław Potocki. They all can be included in the trend of the so-called landowner's poetry, and belong to the collection of Moralia, The Garden of Epigrams, and Pious Songs. The paper shows that those texts are in opposition to tradition, especially the tradition of Czarny Las. It shows the fluctuations in the Sarmatian-Landowner's ethos, the departure from the idealistic illusion of a harmonious coexistence with nature, special biologism and naturalism, and tendency to derision. This makes of Potocki, according to the author, an individual and lonely poet, one that experiences in an extraordinarily dramatic way his relations with nature, and with the world of his contemporary civil and religious ideas.