The second generation of the Romantics looked for their own language of expression, using all the means offered by the post-uprising reality of the Kingdom of Poland: the language of early Romanticism and great exile Romanticism, the language of catastrophe, folk songs, revolution, the language of forgotten history. Thus domestic Romanticism was made up of two big trends, two big wings of the provinces — melancholic and frenetic — for those who had learned to bear captivity and those whose heads were nearly exploding because of turmoil; for the adapted and for the rebels. When Zmorski and Berwiński, an angel-destroyer and a rebel, faced Pol and Syrokomla, who were noble and moderate, there was no agreement between them; they could only provide a testimony to the multi-dimensional, varied nature of domestic Romanticism marked by the stigma of the provinces.
The years 1831–1863 in the Polish Kingdom were marked by the atmosphere of anxiety, fear, fear of tomorrow and regret for what has passed. Warsaw’s Romantics, existing in their own literary world of far provinces, were facing the challenges of their profession — to overcome the stagnation, get out of lifelessness— withdifficulty. Enthusiasts, young gypsies who have grown under the wings of Hippolytus Skimborowicz were engaged in publishing, mobilized all their forces to — in spite of the words of Zygmunt Krasinski, who believed that “now in Poland of flowers and patties one can only write” — create anew style of periodicals. Little articles written by “young enthusiasts”, poetic creations written in esopic language, not always the best reviews of filled the columns of the magazines — critically evaluated by Edward Dembowski. Existence of publishing work was not easy — it had to stand against censorship, copyrights, and above all, capricious tastes of readers. Magazine’s lifespan was not long, it was however the testimony of struggle against the things that terrified and aroused horror.
For the representatives of Victor Hugo’s Red Salon, growing up in the shade of Corneille and Racine, the most important stage of the Romanticist revolution was conquest of the stage of Comédie-Française. Until the Classicist literary forms had been overcome, Romanticism could not consider itself a victorious trend. The article is an attempt to describe the disputes between the romanticists and the classicists in the area of theater, the struggle for a new theater which was to become a tribune of new aesthetic and ideological currents
What more than freedom can people living somewhere in Eastern Europe demand from life when their homeland is held captive? And if these people are young students from Vilnius schools endowed with exceptional sensibility, and a desire to learn and succeed as scholars? And Poland is still held captive. Pupils of Gotfryd Ernest Grodek, Joachim Lelewel and Wilhelm Münnich cannot satisfy their intellectual desires, so they crowd in the European provinces, waiting to be liberated from the darkness of partitions. They will still have to wait for nearly thirty years for the November Uprising. However, during that time, pupils of eminent Orientalists — among them Józef Sękowski, Jan Wiernikowski, Józef Kowalewski, Aleksander Chodźko, Ludwik Spitznagel, Antoni Muchliński, Ignacy Pietraszewski, August Żaba, Aleksander Szemiot, Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słowacki — will turn Vilnius into a fairy tale land of miracles, becoming themselves outstanding scholars studying the Orient and, first of all, translators of Oriental works. Often, under the cover woven out of Arabian nights, they will spin tales about great journeys, wounded hearts and their lost homeland.
The youth of nineteenth century Parisian bohemian authors was spent in the mundus melancholicus, Rousseau’s “enchanted world,” which was full of Werther’s mourning, Chateaubriand’s constant feeling of unfulfilment and Byron’s accursed rebellion. The never-ending loneliness of these individuals, the incurable disease of the spirit and the body, the eternal fever consuming the minds of the enfants du siècle continued for quite some time and made an indelible mark on the bohemian poet, instilling in him a desire to look for his own “self,” to fight for a semblance of being in the world of a Romantic homo viator. Successive generations of young bohemians continued this image of a young man suffering in his soul and body, for whom everything that had happened had gone forever, and what would happen was not there yet. A confrontation of such a way of creating one’s moi seul with emerging rules of bohemian being, a bitter note of living with the sweetness of Hernani’s triumph, creates a romantic mosaic of ambiguities, whirling and indefinable, like the mystery of Mussetean sorrows.