Juliusz Słowacki : Ukrainian School in Polish Romanticism and Goetheism

Abstract

In the already formed as of the first quarter of the twenty-first century scientific views on the Ukrainian school in Polish romanticism, on Ukrainian imagery, symbolism, themes, motifs, and issues in the lyrics of Polish romantics, especially in poems and ballads, in thoughts and elegies, in the song and dramatic works of Juliusz Słowacki, the connections of each of the authors of this format with Ukraine are clearly positioned, the knowledge of Polish figures, participants in the November Uprising, the history and culture of Ukraine, especially folklore, is emphasized, since the leading representatives, founders of the phenomenon (Józef Bohdan Zaleski, Severyn Hoszczynski, Antoniy Malchevsky) came from the territories of Right-Bank Ukraine, from Volhynia. In fact, behind the extensive glorification of the Ukrainian steppe, Cossack liberties and freedoms, and Zaporozhian antiquity, there is hidden not only the idea of contemplative admiration for Ukrainian exoticism, but also potential patriotisms, Polish and Ukrainian, which do not contradict each other, in which the dichotomy of losses and restorations is encoded. Juliusz Słowacki's sentimental and romantic impulses depend not only on Ukrainian and the homeland, but also on progressive concepts that have spread from Western Europe, which is why his dramatic hero, the young adventurer Kordian from the dramatic poem of the same name, travels through modern Europe on historical material, admiring the world, but understanding the public indifference to the fate of this or that enslaved ethnic group. Hence, the picturesqueness of nature, combined with the idealisation of the heroic past, as well as the mystifications associated with the uncertain future of nations, the disjointedness of plot lines, and the fatality of emigrant nostalgia. The concept of the unity of the Polish and Ukrainian peoples is dependent on longing for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, on the spread of knowledge in Europe about the territories of Ukraine and Poland conquered by the Russian Empire, which, of course, should have called upon humanists to restore justice and establish democracy.