S5E6 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.

Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the timeline.

Juliusz Słowacki (1809-49) is the second of the so-called Polish Romantic bards between Adam Mickiewicz and Zygmunt Krasiński, though Krasiński was later overshadowed by the late Romantic poet, Cyprian Kamil Norwid. He was born to a literary and academic family in Kremenets, Volhynia, which is part of modern-day Ukraine. He studied law and worked in the finance ministry in Wilno before spending much of his productive life abroad in France and Switzerland, supporting himself with income from his mother, Salomea’s Ukrainian estates and his own investments of those funds. Unlike Mickiewicz, who was very active politically, Słowacki was able to concentrate entirely on his poetry and other literary output for most of his life.

He is perhaps best known for his Byronic and patriotic drama, “Kordian,” published in 1834, in part responding to Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve, Part III. Kordian, the hero, travels around Europe trying to gather support for opposition to Russian imperialism and becomes involved in a plot to kill Tsar Nicholas I. In light of its anti-Russian content and the general tendency of Romantic drama to be written more for the page than the stage, the work was not performed until fifty years after the poet’s death.

His drama, “Balladyna,” written in 1834, is perhaps one of the most performed works on the Polish stage. It is set in the mythic past and is rich in Shakespearean references. Balladyna is a cruel woman-warrior who spins a web of murder and torture, taking in her own sister and mother, to face her own judgment at the end of the play.

Słowacki’s enigmatic later mystical works, “Genesis from the Spirit” and “King-Spirit” or “Król-Duch” explore the evolution of matter from spirit, similar to the concept of Geist in German Romantic philosophy, and of the evolution and intervention of spirit over time in Polish history.

In this episode we pick up from season 4, episode 1 of “Encounters” on the Ukrainian School in Polish Romanticism and focus on works that reflect on the Ukrainian lands and culture of Słowacki’s youth. These begin with “Wacław,” which continues a theme from Malczewski’s “Maria,” and the poem that first brought him fame, “Beniowski,” which ends with his metaphorical duel with Mickiewicz. We end with “The Silver Dream of Salomea” (1843), which might be seen as a final assessment of the dream of Polish Ukrainian unity and Słowacki’s liberation of himself from his mother, Salomea.

Słowacki is not widely translated into English and is ripe for new translations.

Juliusz Słowacki in English Translation and other resources:

Anna Nasiłowska. A History of Polish Literature. Tr. Anna Zaranko. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2024. Pgs. 213-36.

Juliusz Słowacki. Four Plays: Mary Stuart, Kordian, Balladyna, Horsztyński. Tr. Charles S. Kraszewski. London: Glagoslav Publications, 2018.

Harold B. Segel. Polish Romantic Drama Three Plays in English Translation. London: Routledge, 1997. (Originally from Cornell University Press, available used).

Juliusz Słowacki: Balladina. In Poland’s Angry Romantic: Two Poems and a Play by Juliusz Słowacki, edited and translated by Peter Cochran, Bill Johnston, Mirosława Modrzewska and Catherine O’Neil. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2009.

George G. Grabowicz is the Dmytro Čyževs’kyj Research Professor of Ukrainian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Yale University (1965) and his PhD in comparative literature from Harvard (1975), where he was also Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows (1971-1974). 

Professor Grabowicz has been Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard (1983-1988) and Director of Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute (1989-1996).  He was one of the founders and President (1991-1993) of the International Association for Ukrainian Studies and Chairman of the American Committee of Slavists (1983-1988).   From 2012 to 2018 he was President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US and is currently a Vice-President there. 

In 1997 he founded and since then has been editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian monthly Krytyka, a leading intellectual journal in Ukraine.  Since 2000 the publishing house of Krytyka has produced some one hundred and fifty books, particularly academic books in the humanities, many of them published jointly with Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute, the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the US.

Professor Grabowicz has written on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian literature and on literary theory.  His first book on Shevchenko (The Poet as Mythmaker, 1982; Ukrainian editions: 1991 and 1997) has been voted the most influential academic book of the post-Soviet period in Ukraine.  His most recent publication is the two volume Тарас Шевченко в критиці [Taras Shevchenko: The Critical Reception], Kyiv, Krytyka, 2013 and 2016.  He currently heads an international team of scholars working on a history of Ukrainian literature that is due to appear in 2023.  A full bibliography of his writings (up to 2015) is available online. In March, 2022 he was awarded the Shevchenko Prize, Ukraine’s highest award in the humanities and arts, for his series of articles on modernism and the poet Pavlo Tychyna.

David A. Goldfarb, Host & Producer
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