Search

The significance of Byron's presence in Polish culture and its diverse aspects have been widely noted. Not much has been said, however, on the representation of Byronism as a disease. The rumours of Byron's madness were spread by Annabella, but the very cult of Byron as a celebrity and in particular the attempts of many men who tried to model their life on that of Byron could have been seen as a mental disorder. A fictional study of Byronism as a disease was offered in Zygmunt Kaczkowski's novel Bajronista (The Byronist, 1855-1856; 1857), which used as its epigraph the memorable lines from Słowacki's poem Beniowski, in which the poet declares himself to be a "Byronist". The aim of this paper is to discuss the representation of Byronism in Kaczkowski's novel in the context of the Polish reception of Byron. Kaczkowski attempts to present Byronism as a destructive social and cultural phenomenon; hence he uses the image of a disease, which eventually results in actual illness and death. Kaczkowski's portrayal of Byronic madness is expressive, on the one hand, of the critical tradition represented by Friedrich Schlegel's charges of atheism against Byron and by Kazimierz Brodziński's warnings against dangers of following models of English and German poetry, and on the other hand, of the novelist's disillusionment with the ideology of Polish Romanticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the intertextual relationship between three stanzas from the Canto XXVI (of The Inferno) in La Divina Commedia by Dante and La pesquisa by Juan José Saer (1994). The famous discourse pronounced by Ulysses ('orazion picciola') and quoted in its entirety in the novel is interpreted here as a key not only to La pesquisa but to Saer's oeuvre. The ambiguity of Ulysses's character and of its configuration by Dante, as well as the urgency to pursue knowledge beyond the established limits, voiced in Ulysses's exhortation, point to the fundamental elements of Saer's aesthetics: meditation on knowledge, its pursuit and its limits; uncertainty about human comprehension of the world; tension between the evident and the unreachable; fluctuation between madness and lucidity; inevitability of the cognitive pursuit, and the looming failure as an always possible horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]