A Different Mickiewicz

The Mickiewicz who emerges from the texts included herein is an artist whose work centers on the experience of modernity—an attempt to diagnose it and to formulate his own response. At the same time, that response takes divergent forms in the poet’s work: from acceptance through rejection to paraphrase and reworking; of no less importance is the concealed presence of modernity in his work.

The Mickiewicz of A Different Mickiewicz is above all a writer of contradictions, aporias, and an experience that is impossible and simultaneously necessary; it is defined by many orders of meanings that differentiate his texts’ formulations of the problems they address. This phenomenon manifests itself in the poet’s writings in connection with the formula of writing, the category of subjectivity (including the author’s subjectivity), the vision of history, the experience of reality, the construction of ideological and cultural projects, problems of cognition and religion.

Michał Kuziak. Full Professor. Institute of Polish Literature of the University of Warsaw (Department of Comparative Studies). Author of books and articles on romantic and contemporary literature and the theory of literature and comparative literary studies.