Sentences and Instances

Abstract

Zygmunt Krasiński as a letter-writer endeavoured to recount the intensely personal world of experience he lived in. Cyprian Norwid, by contrast, while writing a letter sought to build up a transactional episode readjusting his affinity with the addressee. In his early years of exile Norwid was keen to rebuke the people he wrote to. His letters then were thought of and written as a sequence of bench-mark events widely transcending his private domain. This excerpt taken from the letter to Jan Koźmian epitomises such an attitude: “I am writing this the way it is”. In the aftermath of his American trauma Norwid the correspondent ceased to try to influence people. Henceforth he would need the exchange of letters to make the best possible use of the opportunity to run his shattered Self via exerting control over his social profile. The focus of the paper is on Norwid's letters to Teofil Lenartowicz and Karol Ruprecht as instances of the pragmatic game conducted by the author.