Romanticism in The Wake of The Revolt
Due to partitions carried out by the neighboring empires – which ended the existence of the sovereign Polish state in 1795 – Polish Romanticism, unlike Romanticism elsewhere in Europe, was largely an independence movement against the foreign occupation, that expressed the ideals and the traditional way of life of the Polish people. The period of Romanticism in Poland ended with the Tsarist suppression of the January 1863 Uprising marked by public executions by the Russians, and deportations to Siberia.
The literature of Polish Romanticism falls into two distinct periods both defined by insurgencies: the first around 1820–1832 ending with the November Uprising of 1830, and the second between 1832–1864, giving birth to Polish Positivism. In the first period, Polish Romantics were heavily influenced by other European Romantics. Their art featured emotionalism and imagination, folklore, country life, as well as the propagation of the ideals of independence. The most famous writers of the period were: Adam Mickiewicz, Seweryn Goszczyński, Tomasz Zan and Maurycy Mochnacki. In the second period, after January Uprising many Polish Romantics worked abroad, often banished from the Polish soil by the occupying power. Their work became dominated by the ideals of freedom and the struggle for regaining their country's lost sovereignty. Elements of mysticism became more prominent. Also in that period, developed the idea of the poeta-wieszcz (nation's bard). The wieszcz functioned as spiritual leader to the suppressed people. The most notable poet among the leading bards of Romanticism, so recognized in both periods, was Adam Mickiewicz. Other two national poets were: Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński. Polish writers and poets of the Romantic period include:
|
|
Read more about this topic: Polish Literature
Famous quotes containing the words romanticism, wake and/or revolt:
“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”
—Charles Bukowski (19201994)
“As long as skies are blue, and fields are green
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (17921822)
“When people put their ballots in the boxes, they are, by that act, inoculated against the feeling that the government is not theirs. They then accept, in some measure, that its errors are their errors, its aberrations their aberrations, that any revolt will be against them. Its a remarkably shrewed and rather conservative arrangement when one thinks of it.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)