Disciple and Connoisseur. Stanisław Cywiński's Attitude to Norwid

Abstract

Stanisław Cywiński (1887-l940), a Vilna teacher (he taught Czesław Miłosz among others) and literature student, is among the most outstanding, and the most completely forgotten, figures in Norwid studies. He was forgotten chiefly because of his firmly held and openly proclaimed opinions close to the national-Catholic orientation and of his uncompromising stance as a publicist; this brought him into conflict with the pre-war political establishment (culminating, to the Sanacja regime's discredit, in his conviction for an affront to the memory of Piłsudski). After the war, Cywiński was classed as a champion of the political right and of religious obscurantism. Cywiński's martyrdom and death in the Soviet labour camps reinforced the existing mechanism of political and ideological interpretation of his position and achievements, also in the area of literary criticism and research. All this affected decisions concerning the collection and reissue of his scattered publications, scholarly interest in him and even his very inclusion as part of the heritage of literary studies.

Still, if any one person among the early researchers could be called a “Norwid scholar”, that appellation was almost as a matter of course linked then, and is to be linked today, with the figure of Cywiński. We have no other example among literary scholars who also wanted to leave their imprint on national culture of someone so totally engrossed in the study of Norwid and doing it with such passion, such perseverance and such acumen. If the concept of “criticism as accompaniment” could be extended so as to include accompanying the progress of the writer's reputation, posthumous representation of his interests, moulding public opinion and mediation between it and the writer's work, then Cywiński would be a rare, indeed an extreme instance of such an attitude. His attitude was notable for its unique focus not just on discovering and studying Norwid, but above all on the “social” aspect of Norwid's work and of his very existence as a model; Cywiński was eager to share the treasures he discovered; he was generous, to some perhaps even importunate, in his efforts to remove stumbling blocks from the reader's path.

Nor did Cywiński rest satisfied with his role as a Norwid admirer and advocate. His zeal for knowledge as a critic was coupled with his temperament as an ideologist and constructor of a model of culture (including social and political culture). His persistent exegesis of Norwid's “testament”, lasting for many years, was to serve his own critical constructions, but it also aimed to put the poet's writings to work as a vehicle for the way of thinking and feeling that Cywiński regarded as exemplary. That is why Cywiński concentrates mainly on a search for regularities, on explaining the mechanisms behind Norwid's work. He aspires to know Norwid fully in order to promulgate him the more confidently, but also to refute objections accusing Norwid of “unintelligibility” and “excessive pride”, which have isolated him from readers, and to correct interpretations he considers erroneous or unfair. His objective is a full “apology” of Norwid, which under the circumstances becomes a restitution and rehabilitation, a justification of his high standing in poetry and culture at large and, perhaps even more importantly, of his potential role in Polish life.

Cywiński's many publications (including some eighty on Norwid), diary entries, his work as a teacher and popularizer (about 150 talks and lectures), and the testimony of his friends demonstrate that Norwid occupied a quite unique position in his hierarchy of values and in the pattern of his spiritual life as a whole almost from the very beginning. The present article seeks to reconstruct the course of both Cywiński's private (personal) and scholarly fascinations with Norwid. Norwid appears frequently in Cywiński's everyday life and work and in his various writings: as an object of reflection and reminiscence, and as an ally, a source of the writer's evaluations and attitudes. One often gets the impression that Cywiński is trying to live “like Norwid” and write “like Norwid”. Our reconstruction of the images of “Norwid the man” and “Norwid the artist” (image of his work) as they emerge from Cywiński's writings leads us to conclude that those images are rich and (despite their “apologetic” character) by and large accurate. The image of Norwid's work gains perspicuity with the adoption of the critic's systems of evaluation and internal hierarchies, and of his more general convictions regarding the essence and functions of literature and art.

The next problem is how Cywiński read Norwid's works, what were the horizons of his reactions and attitudes as “receiver” and whether they can be arranged in a system of “styles of reception” or “norms of interpretation” both from a private and from a critical, scholarly perspective. Cywiński has often been accused of approaching Norwid like a confessor and of subjecting the poet's work to ideological deformation. However, with the variety of critical attitudes ascribed to him, declared by him and evidenced by available testimonies of reception, we have to say that Cywiński's reading of Norwid was profound, many-sided, and marked by an ability to penetrate the writer's principal intentions. That ability perhaps sometimes was a consequence of Cywiński's declared “critical harmony” with the poet, but it must be seen primarily as a fruit of the critic's purposive work, which continued over a period of many years, on finding suitable interpretative contexts and methodological standpoints for Norwid's writings and on enriching the concept of poetry (with types he calls “prose poetry” and “poetry of ideas”) so as to make it encompass the full complexity of Norwid's uncommon literary forms. His exertions led Cywiński to conclude that Norwid's poetry calls for a “special methodology”, imposing on the critic the requirements of perfect preparation, sensitivity and interpretative skill; finally, because of the tragic fates of Norwid's reception, the critic also has to give the poet some “moral credit” and show a willingness to understand him.