Zenon Przesmycki as a Reader of Norwid

Abstract

About the year 1900 the forty-year old Zenon Przesmycki (Miriam), already a renowned poet, translator, aesthete and animator of the literary life of the Young Poland, first came into contact with the work of Norwid. He subsequently devoted the rest of his long life to seeking out, editing and commenting on the works of the forgotten poet. The subject of this study is not the story of Miriam’s private fascination with Norwid, which perhaps led him to abandon his own original work; we shall deal instead with those aspects of Miriam’s reading of Norwid which found their expression in his commentaries and had such a decisive effect on the shape of Norwid studies. By looking at Miriam’s work on Norwid as an integral part of his programme for the renaissance of the spiritual and artistic culture of the Polish nation, for the propagation of the ideal of a great, universal and autonomous art, and for the foundation of aesthetic criticism we can call in question some widespread unfair convictions about him.

It is often claimed, for instance, that as regards both his criticism and his original work Miriam “outlived his day”, that his true end came with the close of the Young Poland period. His preoccupation with Norwid is regarded as an escape, a substitute activity. Miriam’s aim in this is said to have been to create, even by recourse to overestimation and instrumental false interpretation of Norwid, a myth of a brilliant “poete maudit” and to establish a cult of Norwid as a protection against his own sense of impotence as a writer and the loss of his position as “lawgiver” in matters of art. According to this view, Miriam, who preached about Norwid’s genius but was in fact spiritually alien to Norwid and unable to understand him, became the patron of “pathetic, overemotional and apostolic interpretations”. He started the Norwid snobbery and the tendency towards impressionistic and uncritically apologetic ways of writing about Norwid.

Our proof of the groundlessness of these accusations is based first of all on an analysis of the main factors in Przesmycki’s attitude and critical language. We concentrate on his Notes to Cyprian Norwid’s Poezje wybrane (Selected Poems of Cyprian Norwid), which are his only major work on Norwid designed to constitute a whole, a commentary on the editor’s own selection of Norwid’s poetry which he intended to represent Norwid’s profile as a creative artist. That is why Miriam’s selection and his comments appear to provide the fullest answer to the question of how Miriam read Norwid.

The concepts and descriptive formulae most characteristic of Miriam’s critical method fall into several groups. The elements of each group are linked by semantic affinity and by a common function in the critic’s presentation of his opinions or of the characteristics of the poetic phenomena he describes. Among the most essential of these groups is the set of expressions signalling the importance, solemnity, depth or “loftiness” of the works described or dealing with properties of the writer’s ideology, his artistic outlook or his type of poetic imagination. These expressions are usually accompanied by terms bringing out the forcefulness, strength and power of Norwid’s poetry. The power is seen in the suggestiveness of Norwid’s artistic structures, graphic expressiveness, and the ability to impress, that is, shock, delight or fascinate the reader. The two aspects usually go together, so that a single formula renders both the expressive qualities of a work and the strength of its effect on the receiver. The impression of vastness and great difficulty of Norwid’s poetic fabric, of its mysteriousness, is enhanced by occasional terms such as “succinctness” and “conciseness”, which combine the qualities of brevity, compactness and semantic density.

These groups of terms emphasize the monumental, absolute dimension of Norwid’s work, which probably represented for Miriam the embodiment of his own concept of art as the sphere where we find manifested the eternal essence and mystery of being. For all that, Miriam’s commentaries do not create an image of Norwid’s work as a monumental temple or an object of static, aestheticizing contemplation. For even all those depths, heights, brevities and mysteries appear in Miriam’s comments, or are contextually determined, in a way that brings out their hidden energy and dynamic tension. This reflects Miriam’s conviction that the dominant note of Norwid’s work is vitality, movement, metaphorical iridescence and pulsation; hence the critic does, not so much examine states of affairs, as express the reader’s wonderment and try to show the strangeness and uniqueness of Norwid’s poetry.

This alert receptive attitude on the part of the critic is evidenced in his frequent use of such terms as “unheard of”, “astounding”, “extraordinary”, “stupefying”, and especially in the many different terms for “strangeness”. The central term of this group is “wonderfulness” (“wonderfully”, “wonderful”), which has become one of the favourite terms with Norwid scholars (another one is “conciseness”). In Przesmycki’s vocabulary, “wonderfulness” expresses on the one hand rapture, amazement, high evaluation, and on the other an inability to fully capture and verbalize the unique and mysterious properties of the phenomena described as “wonderful”. The crucial role that these terms play in Miriam’s texts allows us to conclude that his basic intention was not to give an objective description of an “object of art”, based on the traditional categories of poetics; it was, instead, to constitute an “aesthetic object”, to share with his readers his own interpretive skill and the fruit of his interpretations. Miriam’S goal was to render the “wonderfully lively pulsation” of Norwid’s work and the no less lively critical reaction, which modestly refrained from expressing authoritative and established opinions in favour of a steady readiness to accept varying points of view, to be surprised or amazed, and to subordinate erudition to the postulate of freshness and authenticity of the emotional, ideological and aesthetic experience. The critic does not baulk at creating his own concepts, seemingly quite unprofessional but in fact precise and correct. What is remarkable, for example, is Miriam’s attitude to the traditional opposition of form vs. content; in this, he was modern and free from the simplifications of his time. He generally avoids using these terms, preferring instead to speak of “the ideological” and “the poetic”, but never losing perspective on the whole and ever intent on capturing the multi-faceted meaning of the poem with its artistic and concretized essence. Many places in Miriam’s commentaries demonstrate that he was acutely conscious of the complicated multi-layered nature of both the structure and the communicative situation of the literary work.

The final section of the present article deals with the constructional and compositional qualities of Przesmycki’s Notes. We can reaffirm the view of some earlier students, such as Borowy, that the Notes form something like a separate Norwid monograph, one closely related to the poems found in the anthology but at the same time having a more general, autonomous value and capable of being read quite apart from the anthology. Miriam manages to preserve the impression of concreteness and uniqueness of the individual poems while also taking note of their multiple organic interconnections. He manages to combine a running commentary with a synthetic issue-oriented approach. The arrangement of the commentary which Miriam adopted and his general and consistent unwillingness to produce separate syntheses may be due to a commentator’s modesty and to his conviction that, in the case of Norwid, successive approximations are better than a systematic exposition; they may also be due to his desire to popularize Norwid and above all to teach others how to read the poet.