On Seers and Prophetic Acts: Zygmunt Krasiński’s Reflections on Poetry and Poets in the Context of the Origins of the Prophecy of Przedświt
Michał SOKULSKI
Zakład Literatury Polskiej Romantyzmu i Pozytywizmu, Instytut Literatury Polskiej, Wydział Filologiczny, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, ul. Fosa Staromiejska 3, 87-100 Toruń, Poland , PolandAbstract
In his epic poem Przedświt [„Predawn”] Zygmunt Krasiński appears as a prophet announcing the Kingdom of God, „a new heaven and a new earth.” However, the poem does not merely express the ‘Adventist dreams’ of the Polish diaspora, since it is also a literary work advancing the ideas of the new prophetic and idealist “poetry of the third epoch.” Przedświt, the voice of the third Polish Romantic “seer,” is simultaneously the conclusion of the “discernment of its own being” by the “nation’s soul” deprived of a political body: the poem explains, in a possibly fullest manner, the meaning of the past and of the future of the Polish nation, pointing to the core of the nation’s mission in the world. Last but not least, Przedświt is also a love poem: while conveying the revelation of the final things, Krasiński also immortalized his Beatrice.
Translated by Dorota Chabrajska
Keywords:
Zbigniew Krasiński, Przedświt, Polish Romantic messianim, prophetism, Juliusz Słowacki, Adam Mickiewicz, August Cieszkowski, literature as an expression of the consciousness of the nation, national character, philosophy of history, Polish RomanticismZakład Literatury Polskiej Romantyzmu i Pozytywizmu, Instytut Literatury Polskiej, Wydział Filologiczny, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, ul. Fosa Staromiejska 3, 87-100 Toruń, Poland
