Wergiliusz Maurycego Mochnackiego. Dziedzictwo antyczne w polemikach przedpowstaniowych
Maurycy Mochnacki’s Virgil. Classical Heritage in the Debates before the November Uprising

Summary/Abstract: Maurycy Mochnacki’s treatise On Polish Literature of the Nineteenth Century (1830) concludes with a critical reappraisal of the Roman poetry, the Virgil’s epic included, and its role in the Polish Renaissance and Enlightenment literary history. Derivative if not plagiaristic in relation to the Greek heritage, and therefore deficient in its purely national characteristics, Roman literature serves in the Mochnacki’s essay as a negative background against the new Polish literature. According to the critic, our romantic poetry looks quite similar to the Homeric epic and the Greek mentality expressed within it, because both, the Greek and the Polish one, have been deeply rooted in its original ethnic traditions. The paper deals with functional and local connotations of Mochnacki’s stand on this issue as seen in the context of the sophisticated, but also broadly accepted, views on the Greek and Roman literary paradigms. Those traditional opinions were commonplaces of university lectures given by Ludwik Osiński, Kazimierz Brodziński and Leon Borowski. Among the telling differences the relationship between aesthetics and politics deserves attention. Due to Mochnacki, any national literature should have the political imperative at its core. In effect, the friction between Mochnacki, a romantic, and Brodziński, an idyllic verse and mitigation adherent, has been distinctively present in their respective comparative imagination, as well as in the struggle between the Romantics and the Classics in the Polish press of the time.

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