Curiosity and coincidentia oppositorum: on the legacy of Aleksander Sapieha as an author of Journey around the Slavic countries in the years 1802 and 1803 Cover Image

Ciekawość i coincidentia oppositorum: o spuściźnie Aleksandra Sapiehy jako autora Podróży w krajach słowiańskich odbywanych w latach 1802gim i 1803cim
Curiosity and coincidentia oppositorum: on the legacy of Aleksander Sapieha as an author of Journey around the Slavic countries in the years 1802 and 1803

Author(s): Magdalena Połczyńska
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: Aleksander Antoni Sapieha; moderate Enlightenment; Slavophilism; idealization; hermeneutic interpretation

Summary/Abstract: Aleksander Antoni Sapieha has gone down in the history of Polish science, he is one of the episodic figures in the political history of our country in the Napoleonic era; and in the history of Polish literature he appears as the author of the Enlightenment travelogue. The reading of Journey around the Slav countries in the years 1802 and 1803 and the semantically defined narrator-heroreal author on the basis of hermeneutic interpretation is an attempt to supplement the ways in which both, the travel book and its creator, are discussed in Polish scientific and popular science literature about those aspects that can be derived from the text itself. Among them, attention is paid to the specificity of a research attitude stretched, so to speak, between its two complementary pars, rational and idealistic, combined in a particular pragmatism of knowledge, in which the pursuit of cognition accompanies the pursuit of common good. The result of the hermeneutic experience of reading Sapiehaʼs travelogue is an attempt to capture his scientific and social heritage which takes into consideration the plane of this internally doubled, yet coherent research attitude, which in a broader sense seems to be surprisingly fresh and inspiring.

  • Issue Year: 2018
  • Issue No: 15
  • Page Range: 193-206
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Polish