Ignacy Krasicki - Life

Life

Krasicki was born in Dubiecko, on southern Poland's San River, into a family bearing the title of count of the Holy Roman Empire. He was related to the most illustrious families in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and spent his childhood surrounded with the love and solicitude of his own family.

He attended a Jesuit school in Lwów, then studied at a Warsaw Catholic seminary (1751–54). In 1759 he took holy orders and continued his education in Rome (1759–61). Two of his brothers also entered the priesthood.

Returning to Poland, Krasicki became secretary to the Primate of Poland and developed a friendship with future King Stanisław August Poniatowski. When Poniatowski was elected king (1764), Krasicki became his chaplain. He participated in the King's famous "Thursday dinners" and co-founded the Monitor, the preeminent Polish Enlightenment periodical, sponsored by the King.

In 1766 Krasicki, after having served that year as coadjutor to Prince-Bishop of Warmia Adam Stanisław Grabowski, was himself elevated to Prince-Bishop of Warmia and ex officio membership in the Senate of the Commonwealth. This office gave him a high standing in the social hierarchy and a sense of independence. It did not, however, prove a quiet haven. The Warmia cathedral chapter welcomed its superior coolly, fearing changes. At the same time, there were growing provocations and pressures from Prussia, preparatory to seizure of Warmia in the First Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Krasicki protested publicly against external intervention.

In 1772, as a result of the First Partition, instigated by Prussia's King Frederick II ("the Great"), Krasicki became a Prussian subject. He did not, however, pay homage to Warmia's new master.

He now made frequent visits to Berlin, Potsdam and Sanssouci at the bidding of Frederick, with whom he cultivated an acquaintance. This created a difficult situation for the poet-bishop who, while a friend of the Polish king, maintained close relations with the Prussian king. These realities could not but influence the nature and direction of Krasicki's subsequent literary productions, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Fables and Parables (1779).

Soon after the First Partition, Krasicki officiated at the 1773 opening of Berlin's St. Hedwig's Cathedral, which Frederick had built for Catholic immigrants to Brandenburg and Berlin. In 1786 Krasicki was called to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. His residences in the castle of the bishops of Warmia at Lidzbark Warmiński (in German, Heilsberg) and in the summer palace of the bishops of Warmia at Smolajny became centers of artistic patronage for all sectors of partitioned Poland.

After Frederick the Great's death, Krasicki continued relations with Frederick's successor.

In 1795, six years before his death, Krasicki was elevated to Archbishop of Gniezno (thus, to Primate of Poland).

Krasicki was honored by Poland's King Stanisław August Poniatowski with the Order of the White Eagle and the Order of Saint Stanisław, as well as with a special 1780 medal featuring the Latin device, "Dignum laude virum Musa vetat mori" ("The Muse will not let perish, men who are deserving of glory"); and by Prussia's King Frederick the Great, with the Order of the Red Eagle.

Upon his death in Berlin in 1801, Krasicki was laid to rest at St. Hedwig's Cathedral, which he had consecrated. In 1829 his remains were transferred to Poland's Gniezno Cathedral.

Czesław Miłosz describes Krasicki:

He was a man of the golden mean, a smiling, skeptical sage prais moderation and despis extremes. His was a mentality which returned to Horatian ideals of the Renaissance, to a life of contemplative retirement. This did not interfere with his talents as a courtier: he was a favorite of Stanisław August, and after the irst artition, when his bishopric of Warmia became the property of Prussia, he was a favorite of King Frederick the Great. e was a cosmopolit and owed his imposing literary knowledge to his readings in foreign languages, yet... he was indebted to the mentality of the Polish "Golden Age," and in this respect his admiration for Erasmus of Rotterdam is significant. As a poet, he was for that distillation of the language which for a while toned down the chaotic richness of the Baroque. In a way, he returned to the clear and simple language of Kochanowski, and his role in Polish poetry may be compared to that of Alexander Pope in English poetry. e conceived of literature as a specific vocation, namely, to intervene as a moralist in human affairs. Since he was not pugnacious by temperament (contrary to one of his masters, Voltaire), his moralizing, rarely distinguishable from sheer play, vitriolic accents.