Romanticism, or Inter Esse

Magdalena Siwiec

Romanticism, or Inter Esse

Comparative Studies in Polish and European Literature

Translated by Thomas Anessi

Berlin · Bruxelles · Chennai · Lausanne · New York · Oxford

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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Siwiec, Magdalena author

Title: Romanticism, or inter esse : comparative studies in Polish and European literature / Magdalena Siwiec ; translated by Thomas Anessi.

Other titles: Romantyzm, czyli inter esse. English

Description: Berlin ; New York : Peter Lang, 2025. | Series: Cross-roads : studies in culture, literary theory, and history, 2191-6179 ; vol. 38 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2025041458 (print) | LCCN 2025041459 (ebook) | ISBN 9783631914014 hardback | ISBN 9783631938171 pdf | ISBN 9783631939703 epub

Subjects: LCSH: Polish literature--19th century--History and criticism | Romanticism--Poland | LCGFT: Literary criticism

Classification: LCC PG7053.R6 S582513 2025 (print) | LCC PG7053.R6 (ebook)

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025041458

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2025041459

Cover image

© Magdalena Siwiec

Cover Design by Peter Lang Group AG

The publication is financed by the state budget as part of the program implemented by the Ministry of Education and Science called “National Programme for the Development of the Humanities”, project no. NPRH/U21/SP/507540/2021/11, financing amount PLN 69 939 zł, total project value PLN 69 939 zł (Poland).

ISSN 2191-6179

ISBN 978-3-631-91401-4 (Print)

ISBN 978-3-631-93817-1 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-3-631-93970-3 (ePUB)

DOI 10.3726/b23008

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne (Switzerland)

Published by Peter Lang GmbH, Berlin (Germany)

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Polish edition of the work was published under the following title: Romantyzm, czyli inter esse, Warszawa: Instytut Badan Literackich PAN Wydawanictwo, ISBN: 978-83-65573-59-9. Copyright by Instytut Badan Literackich PAN, 2017. Copyright by Magdalena Siwiec

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Inter Esse

Part I The Romantic Crisis of the Subject

Between the Strong and the Weak Self

Part II The Mages of Romanticism

Between Virtuosity and Priesthood

1. The Mages of Romanticism: Hugo and Mickiewicz

2. Romantic Oriental Cycles: Les Orientales and The Crimean Sonnets

3. On Two Mickiewiczian Concepts of Inspiration

4. Victor Hugo’s ‘Elegiac Moment’

Part III Poetesses and Enchantresses

Between Women’s Poetry and the Phantasm of Femininity

1. ‘I know that women aren’t required to write; / Yet write I do’: Marceline Desbordes-Valmore and the Anxiety of Authorship

2. Is a Romantic Poetess a Poet? On Narcyza Żmichowska’s ‘The Poet’s Happiness’

3. Nerval’s Enchantresses: Opera in the Realm of Romantic Phantasms

4. Questions About Krasiński’s Feminism

Part IV In a Disenchanted World

Between Heroism and Resignation

1. Novalis’s Re-enchantment

2. Oneiric Apocalypses in Krasiński’s Geneva Fragments

3. Marionettes, Masks and Dreams: Around Romantic Nothingness

4. The Early Romantic Novel and the Poetics of the Postmodern Novel: Bonaventura’s The Nightwatches

5. Lieu de mémoire—lieu de folie by Seweryn Goszczyński

Bibliography

Index of Names

Introduction: Inter Esse

Johannes Climacus—a figure used as an alter ego by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard—observes how the arguments of his father’s interlocutors took shape then collapsed under the weight of a single counter-argument, how they became intelligible to him then suddenly ceased to ring true, appearing doubtful instead.¹ In Kierkegaard’s dialectic de omnibus dubitandum est, the notion of doubt, associated with the contradictory nature of thinking, plays a key role. It hardly seems like a revelation to say that contradictory thinking is one of the determining features of Romanticism and even, for some scholars, the main principle underlying it.² It is certainly possible to write a book about Romantic doubt. However, this is not the primary focus of the present work, though it is among the topics it addresses. The texts contained herein, all of which concern Romantic literature, are linked by the category inter esse, which is also used by Kierkegaard (in the guise of Climacus), who was, incidentally, one of the most interesting critics of Romanticism, despite being a part of the movement himself. Indeed, I believe that all of the most influential Romantic poets were simultaneously co-creators and internal critics of Romanticism, shaping and challenging its foundations.

The inter esse—a reference to that which is in-between, elusive, and eluding clear-cut—makes possible the movement and dynamism that is so essential to Romanticism. According to Climacus, consciousness is also inter esse (identified with interest), for it always has a relative character, while relation, in turn, presupposes duality: ‘Had nothing else but dichotomies been created, there would have been no doubt; for the possibility of doubt lies in that third entity, Consciousness, which puts the two opposing things into relationship with each other.’³ Thus, following Kierkegaard’s analogy further, one could say that this book points to ‘the third’—to that which is not spoken of directly, which lies between the cases described here: between the texts, the writers and the problems. Therefore, it is possible to precisely define that—and only that—which is borderline and, thus, most fully representative of Romanticism; that which is at its poles. At the same time, Romanticism itself remains elusive as ‘the third’—difficult to grasp, and possible to define only through the poles between which it is situated. In this sense, one could say that Romanticism is a coincidentia oppositorum. After all, it does not exist as an actual entity but as a kind of an abstract creation made up of dozens of variants, currents and counter-currents, sometimes close to one another and often mutually exclusive. It slips away like Eurydice when one tries to view it, to subdue it, or to grasp it.

Maurice Blanchot believes that for Orpheus, Eurydice is ‘the limit of what art can attain; concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is the profoundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead.’⁴ The artist is constantly moving towards this point, although he cannot reach it, because the only way to descend towards it, paradoxically, is to turn away from it. The absence of what is made present—the dead loved one—becomes the guarantor of continued movement and inspiration. One of the oldest iconographic representations of Orpheus, the famous Neapolitan relief—about which Rainer Maria Rilke, Zbigniew Herbert and Aleksander Wat, among others, have written—shows three figures: the Thracian lyricist, Eurydice and Hermes. Eurydice, situated in the centre of the artefact—between two men and two worlds, and belonging to both and to neither of them simultaneously—becomes a figure of that which remains elusive, a figure of inter esse.

Therefore, I attempt to approach Romanticism and identify the border areas and extremes between which there is a space open to this third element. This space is difficult to define and gives rise to constant tensions. The articles collected herein are not intended to yield a synthesis but rather to form a constellation that arises from a juxtaposition of different cases, from approaching one clearly defined version of Romanticism and moving away from it, by counterpointing it with another, with contextualisation and decontextualisation being essential moves in this reading. I analyze and interpret these instances and counter-currents in subsequent chapters, each of which can, however, function fully autonomously. I focus on specific, unique texts by known poets because they have more value, in my view, than abstract systems pretending to encapsulate ‘the whole.’ I, therefore, propose—following again in the footsteps of Kierkegaard—not to strive for universalisation, but instead an analysis of case studies and their confrontation.

However, before these case studies, firstly I examine a basic issue which is fundamental to Romanticism, conceived as the threshold to modernity, namely: the problem of the subject. The Romantic self (the literary ‘I’) is one of the key sources of modern subjectivity. By referring to the anecdote about Climacus that opens this book, I intend to show the complicated nature of this self, stretched between a strong ego and a weak subjectivity. The emphasis on the latter aspect is part of a revisionist current in critical reading, as research has perpetuated the tradition of seeing the Romantic subject as a strong subject and tying it to the individualism and subjectivity ascribed to the epoch. Meanwhile, as I attempt to prove, this issue is by no means obvious or unambiguous. While still assuming the existence of strong constructions of the subject in Romanticism, I draw attention to places where this basic model has been shaken, broken or cracked. My thesis is that two opposing processes are operating within Romanticism: the revival of individualism and the crisis of the subject, understood as a self-confident subject. The symptoms of this crisis of the strong self undoubtedly constitute some of the most salient Romantic antecedents of the critical phase of modernity. In fact, all the other problems presented in this book stem, in a sense, from this very issue, outlined in the opening chapter, entitled ‘The Romantic Crisis of the Subject: Between the Strong and the Weak Self.’

In the first part of the book, devoted to the Mages of Romanticism—a term I have adopted following Paul Bénichou—I write about Adam Mickiewicz and Victor Hugo, poets who pioneered Romanticism in Poland and France by introducing new ideas and aesthetic solutions that had a lasting and defining impact on understanding poetry. This part consists of four chapters, the first two of which examine the work of both writers from a comparative perspective. I juxtapose the most important stages of the creative evolution in Mickiewicz’s and Hugo’s reflection on poetry, beginning with poems and ballads from the 1820s, the accompanying paratexts in which the writers built the foundations of a new paradigm, ‘eastern’ lyric poetry that marked out a path for change in the existing poetic model, and finishing with the concept of ‘poetry as magic,’ which constituted the culminating point in the works of both of these Romantics and which can be seen in both Mickiewicz’s ‘The Great Improvisation’ (Wielka improwizacja) and Hugo’s ‘Les Mages’ (The Mages) from the volume Les Contemplations (Contemplations). I devote a separate chapter to the aforementioned ‘eastern’ poems, represented by The Crimean Sonnets (Sonety krymskie) and Les Orientales, which reveal different models of Orientalism. I examine the relevance of postcolonial tools in their reading and I am particuraly interested in the metapoetic and avant-garde dimensions of both of these poem collections. What is significant in the context of the relationship between the East and the West are, once again, the questions concerning the subject and its relation to the created world—so, the world in which the people of the Orient are presented. The poetic Orient is situated between the real and the imaginary (phantasmagorical, cultural) and becomes a field of battle for the new poetry, while the encounter with the Other leads to a transgression of the established framework for poetic language.

The following two chapters in this part of the book focus separately on the works of Mickiewicz and Hugo. In the first chapter, I outline the evolution of Mickiewicz’s concept of inspiration, presenting the poet’s ways of embracing the traditionally established figures associated with inspiration, especially the topic of the Muses. This evolution appears as a transition from one extreme attitude to its polar opposite: from activity to passivity, from pride to humility, from the autonomy of the creator to the acceptance of his total dependence. Mickiewicz’s youthful works are marked by a conviction that the source of creative inspiration is not a force external to the artist, but rather that the artist is an autonomous creator, which leads to an appreciation of the individual’s inner experience. As I try to demonstrate, however, the writer’s attitude shifts, ultimately abandoning his stand for individualism and adopting a concept of inspiration as the intervention of a higher force, making the poet an instrument of God. Here, I pose questions about the path that led Mickiewicz to this transformation. In the subsequent chapter, I attempt to define the place of elegiac modality in Hugo’s poetic output, and—as in the case of Mickiewicz—I demonstrate the transition in his poetry from one ideological/aesthetic dominant to another. The starting point and a primary interpretative tool for my reading here is a definition of elegy derived from the writings of the German theorists Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. This approach to the elegy simultaneously exposes both what is ideal and what is lost, and represents a response to the experience of crisis inherent in Romanticism. Hugo’s first poetic volumes appear as inherently anti-religious: for instance, the politically engaged Odes and Les Orientales, which openly promote the unlimited freedom of the creative imagination. My interpretation of the specific works from these collections shows that indeed, they do have an elegiac tone, although it is not the dominant one but rather a counter-current. I present Les feuilles d’automne (Autumn Leaves)—which contains works of a contemplative, melancholic, visionary and self-reflexive character—as a work that openly valorises the elegiac, hitherto disparaged by Hugo, but also ever-present in his oeuvre. In this section on the chapter, I aim to expose the aporias or tensions found in the works—even very early works—of poets closely identified with Romanticism and belonging to the generation least affected by disillusionment. I see Mickiewicz’s and Hugo’s thinking about poetry as caught between a belief in the priestly function of the poet, who perceives himself as an instrument of God, and filled with divine passion, and their convictions about creative autonomy; it is a struggle between optimism and doubt, between an orientation towards the future and the present, and elegiac expression, between irony and melancholy.

The second part of the book concerns ‘feminine’ Romanticism in a twofold sense. On the one hand, I am interested in the important place in the Romantic paradigm of poetry written by women—and thus I begin with this—which is by definition marginalised but essentially shifts the meaning and complicates the image of Romanticism. On the other hand, I return to the phantasms of femininity in literature written by men, constitutive of the Romantic paradigm—if only because of the concept of Romantic love, though this is not the sole reason.

The first chapter in this part of the book deals with selected poems by Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, which juxtapose poetry and femininity as opposing, mutually exclusive and yet coexisting values. Despite my depreciation of her work by exposing its weaknesses, partiality and insecurities, I do not present Desbordes-Valmore as a writer who lacks her own voice but as a poet who brings a certain—positive—distinctiveness to women’s writing. Her poetry is emotional, simple and naive, but she consciously chooses to produce it as such because of the truthful quality she ascribes to these values. I examine the problem of women’s self-referentiality in Romanticism by tracing rhetorical evocations of the Muse in Desbordes-Valmore’s Élégies (Elegies). In the rivalry between love and the Muse presented in the poems in this cycle, the former appears victorious. However, I believe that as poetry makes passion its object, writing provides a potential means for overcoming the frenzy of love—it gives a chance for the subject-poet to transcend herself as a loving woman, a chance for her to transgress her identity.

The second chapter in this part of the book is a companion of sorts to the first, as it presents the same issues in women’s writing in Poland—the situation of which was slightly different than in France. I interpret Narcyza Żmichowska’s early work Szczęście poety (The Poet’s Happiness) by reading it as a poem about the identity of the Romantic textual subject who defines herself as a poet and as a woman. Central to my proposed reading, the question of the language with which the lyrical ‘I’ speaks of her genius, inspiration and creativity, is outlined against the background of both Romantic self-referentiality and the era’s characteristic way of depicting women. These two issues and their dialectical clash constitute, in my opinion, the most significant context for Żmichowska’s work. From this clash arises an important transformation of the poem’s associated topoi. My analysis of Szczęście poety aims to show how the subject and its successive manifestations reveal themselves and are repeatedly transgressed. As a result, the poem’s ‘I’ proves to be a transgressive subject that recognises itself in particular forms in order to free itself from constraints, including those of gender—which becomes possible, as in Desbordes-Valmore’s elegies, through poetry.

The next two chapters focus on the image of women in the works of Gérard de Nerval and Zygmunt Krasiński. The first introduces opera as a context—one that is inherently, as I try to prove, phantasmagorical. References to opera allow the Romantic writer to create the illusion of a magical world as a response to the experience of disillusionment with reality. Dreams of the Orient and disillusionment with the real East are reflected in Nerval’s idea of staging The Magic Flute at the foot of the pyramids and in his portrayal of—and at this point, the issue of femininity becomes crucial—the Queen of Sheba. Fundamental to this phantasm are the figures of the sorceress and the seductress, with whom Jean Starobinski links the opera. In this chapter, I try to reveal their function in Nerval’s lyric poetry, novellas (‘Sylvie’ and ‘La Pandora’), Voyage en Orient, and his letters to Théophile Gautier, written from Egypt.

The final chapter of this part of the book presents literary and paraliterary statements by Krasiński that reveal the poet’s sensitivity to the female question, which constituted a break from stereotypical, conservative perceptions of social roles—which are also strongly present in his writings. My analysis of selected texts reveals the writer’s sensitivity to the oppression inherent in patriarchal society’s relation to women; Krasiński stigmatises the various ways in which women are reified, also a result of the Romantic divinisation of the female sex. In the conclusion to this chapter, I recall the poet’s image of a ‘third epoch,’ which constitutes a utopian project for resolving this inequality, including his proclamation about the metaphysical and social equality of the sexes.

In this part of the book, it is, therefore, possible to see how the meaning of this ‘Romantic femininity’ oscillates between two poles—the feminine and the masculine—and how this oscillation affects women’s writing, which is torn, on the one side, between society’s expectations of the female author and a fear of writing, and the author’s desire to realise herself in poetry, on the other side. Nerval’s and Krasinski’s works demonstrate two different treatments of the image of women, though these are by no means permanently attributed to them. Each of the chosen examples shows one of the extremes. Thus, Nerval represents what can be described as the phantasmagorical current, one that is dominant in Romanticism, although in his writing, it takes on an exceptional form. In turn, Krasiński, who himself often wrote about his Beatrice, appears this time as a writer who remains sensitive to the social disadvantages of being a women.