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Dante and Polish Writers

Dante and Polish Writers: From Romanticism to the Present explores the
phenomenon of Polish Danteism from a hermeneutic perspective. The
chapters shed light on a series of “encounters” of eminent Polish writers
with Dante and the Divine Comedy, resulting in original interpretations,
creative reworkings, and a wealth of intertextual references testifying to
a dialogue that has always been –​and still is –​alive, not excluding antag-
onism and bitter controversy. The contributors are all scholars of Polish
literature with comparative expertise, teaching in Italian and Polish uni-
versities, which ensures a consistently focused point of view on the recep-
tive context and the ways in which it is affected by the confrontation with
Dante. The hermeneutic horizon ranges from the Inferno-​ like reading
of the inhuman lands with which history abounds, to the metaphysical
yearning underlying Dante’s “poetics of transhumanizing,” to recent
perspectives related to the posthuman and storytelling.

Andrea Ceccherelli is Full Professor of Slavistics –​Polish Language and

Literature at the University of Bologna and Chair of the Center for
Contemporary Poetry at the same university. His main fields of research
are Polish literature of the sixteenth–​ seventeenth and twentieth cen-
turies, Polish-​Italian comparative studies (e.g. the presence of Dante in
Miłosz’s works), translation and self-​translation (e.g. Gombrowicz). He
has authored a monograph on Piotr Skarga’s collection of the lives of
Saints (2003) and contributed chapters on Renaissance and Modernism
to the Einaudi History of Polish Literature (2004, translated into Polish
in 2009), and co-​authored a book on Wisława Szymborska, Szymborska.
Un alfabeto del mondo (An Alphabet of the World) (2016). He is also a
translator of Polish contemporary literature into Italian (Czesław Miłosz,
Zbigniew Herbert, Józef Czapski, Anna Świrszczyńska, Kornel Filipowicz,
Jan Twardowski, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski). In add-
ition, he has translated Szymborska’s biography by Anna Bikont and
Joanna Szczęsna (2015), as well as the memories of Szymborska’s secre-
tary Michał Rusinek (2019).
Routledge Studies in Romanticism

The Presence of God in the Works of William Wordsworth

Eliza Borkowska

The Absent God in the Works of William Wordsworth

Eliza Borkowska

The Moving Body and the English Romantic Imaginary

Kristin Flieger Samuelian

George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’

A Sequential and Contextual Reading
Franco Marucci

Robert Pollok’s The Course of Time and Literary Theodicy in the

Romantic Age
The Rise and Fall of a Christian Epic
Deryl Davis

Romantic Futures
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Edited by Evy Varsamopoulou

Dante and Polish Writers

From Romanticism to the Present
Edited by Andrea Ceccherelli

For more information on this series, please visit www.routle​dge.com/​Routle​dge-​Stud​ies-​in-​

Roma​ntic​ism/​book-​ser​ies/​SE0​699
Dante and Polish Writers
From Romanticism to the Present

Edited by Andrea Ceccherelli

First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Andrea Ceccherelli; individual chapters,
the contributors
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and of the contributors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data
Names: Ceccherelli, Andrea, editor.
Title: Dante and Polish writers : from Romanticism to the present / Andrea Ceccherelli.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. |
Series: Routledge studies in Romanticism |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2023041501 (print) | LCCN 2023041502 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032365626 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032367262 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003333524 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321–Appreciation–Poland. |
Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321–Influence. | Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321.
Divina commedia. | Polish literature–History and criticism. |
LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays.
Classification: LCC PQ4385.P6 D36 2024 (print) |
LCC PQ4385.P6 (ebook) | DDC 851/.1–dc23/eng/20231004
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041501
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041502
ISBN: 9781032365626 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032367262 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003333524 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/​9781003333524
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents

Notes on Contributors vii

Acknowledgments xii

Inhuman, transhuman, posthuman: An introduction to

Polish Danteism over the centuries 1
A N D R E A C E C CH E RE L L I

1 Dante and Mickiewicz: The story of a common journey 8

TO M A S Z J Ę D R ZE JE WSKI

2 Słowacki’s Poem of Piast Dantyszek, or the macabre

despair of a father-​land 25
K RY S TY N A J AWO RSKA

3 Reason and will: Dante and Krasiński, a comparison 39

M A R I N A C I C CA RIN I

4 Dante in Norwid’s Prayer Book 51

F R A N C E S C O CA B RA S

5 Echoes of Inferno V in Kraszewski’s narrative and

lyrical work 64
A N D R E A F. D E CA RL O

6 “Better to fall with Alighieri than to triumph with

Nogaret”: Klaczko’s Dante 80
L U C A B E R N A RDIN I
vi Contents

7 The Dante of Stanisław Vincenz 95

L O R E N Z O C OSTAN TIN O

8 Teodor Parnicki encounters Dante: Only Beatrice and

not only 111
M A R C I N W Y RE MB E L SKI

9 From parody to polemical pamphlet: Gombrowiczian

deformations of Dante 125
A N D R E A C E C CH E RE L L I

10 On Czesław Miłosz’s debt to Dante 138

L U I G I M A R I NE L L I

11 What Dante owes to Stanisław Barańczak 148

M A R C E L L O P IA CE N TIN I

12 Dante in twenty-​first-​century Poland: The case of

Jarosław Mikołajewski 159
L E O N A R D O MA SI

Index by Nadzieja Bąkowska 176

Notes on Contributors

Luca Bernardini, a Slavist, is Associate Professor of Polish Literature at the

University of Milan. He participated in the writing of the Einaudi History
of Polish Literature (2004, translated into Polish in 2009), has written
a monograph on Polish travelers in Florence (Poles in Florence, 2005),
and edited the Italian versions of Wisława Szymborska’s Nonrequired
Reading: Prose Pieces (2006) and How to Live More Comfortably (2016),
as well as Adam Zagajewski’s essays Two Cities (2007). He has also
translated into Italian and edited Story of a Secret State. My report to the
World by Jan Karski (2013), the writer who first revealed to the Western
world the extermination of the Jews of Eastern Europe, and Miron
Białoszewski’s Memoirs of the Warsaw Uprising (2021). In the field of
Dante, he has recently published in Italian a text entitled “Alla ricerca del
sasso di Dante: la Firenze dantesca nelle memorie dei viaggiatori polacchi
dell’Ottocento” (In search of “Dante’s Stone:” Dante’s Florence in the
memoirs of nineteenth-century Polish travelers, 2021).

Francesco Cabras is currently Adjunct Professor of Italianistics at the

Pedagogical University in Cracow. He graduated in Italianistics from the
University of Padua with a dissertation on Jan Kochanowski’s Foricoenia
and received his PhD in Polonistics from the University of Milan. His
research focuses particularly on Polish Renaissance literature, as well as
on Neo-​Latin literature in Poland and its connections with European Neo-​
Latin literature. He is the author of an annotated edition of Kochanowski’s
Latin elegies (2019) and several articles on the Czarnolas poet. He also
cultivates Polish-​Italian comparative studies: as such he has investigated
the phenomenon of Petrarchism in sixteenth-​century Poland and devoted
an article to the knowledge of Dante in fifteenth-​and sixteenth-​century
Poland (2022).
viii Notes on Contributors

Andrea Ceccherelli is Full Professor of Slavistics –​Polish Language and

Literature at the University of Bologna and Chair of the Center for
Contemporary Poetry at the same university. His main fields of research
are Polish literature of the sixteenth–​ seventeenth and twentieth cen-
turies, Polish-​Italian comparative studies (e.g. the presence of Dante in
Miłosz’s works), translation and self-​translation (e.g. Gombrowicz). He
has authored a monograph on Piotr Skarga’s collection of the lives of
Saints (2003) and contributed chapters on Renaissance and Modernism
to the Einaudi History of Polish Literature (2004, translated into Polish
in 2009), and co-​authored a book on Wisława Szymborska, Szymborska.
Un alfabeto del mondo (An Alphabet of the World) (2016). He is also a
translator of Polish contemporary literature into Italian (Czesław Miłosz,
Zbigniew Herbert, Józef Czapski, Anna Świrszczyńska, Kornel Filipowicz,
Jan Twardowski, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski). In add-
ition, he has translated Szymborska’s biography by Anna Bikont and
Joanna Szczęsna (2015), as well as the memories of Szymborska’s secre-
tary Michał Rusinek 2019).

Marina Ciccarini is Full Professor of Polish Language and Literature at Tor

Vergata University of Rome. Her fields of research include text criticism
and Polish sixteenth-​ century memoirs, seventeenth-​ century Russian-​Polish
comparative studies, the Polish literary canon and literature in late Baroque
and Enlightenment Era, Polish Romanticism, and twentieth-​century theater
and poetry. Her publications include the monographs: Ultimi roghi. Fede e
tolleranza alla fine del Seicento: il caso di A.Ch. Belobockij (Last Burnings.
Faith and Tolerance in the Late Seventeenth Century: the Case of A.Ch.
Belobockij, 2008) and Żart, inność, zbawienie. Studia z kultury i literatury
polskiej (Joke, Otherness, Salvation. Studies in Polish Culture and Literature,
2008). She has also translated and edited the following poetry collections: Ewa
Lipska, L’occhio incrinato del tempo (The Cracked Eye of Time, 2013);
E. Lipska, Il lettore di impronte digitali e altre poesie (The Fingerprint Reader
and Other Poems, 2017); Małgorzata Lebda, La cella reale (The Royal Cell,
2018), E. Lipska, Memoria operativa –​L’amore in procedura di emergenza
(Operational Memory –​Love in Emergency Procedure, 2022).

Lorenzo Costantino, PhD in Slavistics, currently teaches Slavic Philology

at the eCampus telematic University and is also head of the film depart-
ment at the Polish Institute in Rome, the cultural office of the Embassy
of the Republic of Poland in Italy. His main areas of research focus on
Polish literature, both ancient and contemporary, and Translation Studies.
His publications include the anthology Teorie della traduzione in Polonia
(Theories of Translation in Poland, 2009) and the monograph Necessità e
poetica. Profilo della traduttologia polacca contemporanea (Necessity and
 Notes on Contributors ix

Poetry. A Profile of Contemporary Translation Studies in Poland, 2012).

He is also a translator from Polish.

Andrea F. De Carlo teaches Polish Language and Literature at “L’Orientale”

University of Naples. In the academic years 2006–​2010 he taught Polish
language and literature at University of Salento in Lecce, and in 2020–​
2021 at Aldo Moro University of Bari. He has been a visiting professor at
several Polish universities: University of Silesia in Katowice (2017–​2018),
University of Białystok (2019–​2020), University of Łódź (2020–​2021),
and Jan Długosz University in Częstochowa (2021–​2022). He obtained
his PhD at the University of Salento with a thesis on Dante in nineteenth-​
century Poland, conducting a comparison between the different translations
of the Divine Comedy by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, Julian Korsak, Antoni
Stanisławski, and Edwad Porębowicz. He recently authored the mono-
graph Dantes maxime mirandus in minimis. Kraszewski e Dante (2019)
and is currently working on a critical edition of Kraszewski’s translation of
the Divine Comedy. His research interests focus on Polish literature, cul-
tural relationships between Italy and Poland and poetic translation.

Krystyna Jaworska is Full Professor of Polish Language and Literature at

the University of Turin. Her main areas of research include the literature
of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century Polish emigration with particular
reference to the Romantic period and the consequences of World War II
on literary activity. Other research interests include contemporary poetry,
travel literature and cultural connections between Italy and Poland. She
is the author of over 150 publications, including the monographs Poeti
e patrioti polacchi nell’Italia risorgimentale (Polish Poets and Patriots in
Italian Risorgimento, 2012) and Dalla deportazione all’esilio. Percorsi
nella letteratura polacca della seconda guerra mondiale (From Deportation
to Exile. Paths in Polish World War II Literature, 2019). She has translated
and edited Adam Zagajewski’s anthology of poems Dalla vita degli oggetti
(From the Life of Objects, 2012), edited Gustaw Herling’s selected writings
Etica e letteratura (Ethics and Literature, 2019), and curated several histor-
ical exhibitions dedicated to Polish presences in Italy. In 2007 she received
the Gold Medal for Merit to Culture “Gloria Artis” and in 2014, the
Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.

Tomasz Jędrzejewski is Assistant Professor in the Institute of Polish

Literature, University of Warsaw. His research focuses on European
Classicism, Rococo, Sentimentalism, Romanticism, as well as the relations
between press and literature. His main publications include Literatura
w warszawskiej prasie kulturalnej pogranicza oświecenia i romantyzmu
(Literature in the Warsaw Culture Press at the Turn of Enlightenment and
x Notes on Contributors

Romanticism, 2016), Czytanie Dziadów w czterech częściach (Reading

of Forefathers’ Eve in the Four Parts, 2018), and Blednący atrament.
Polskie rokoko literackie lat 1795–​1830 na tle europejskim (Fading Ink.
Polish Literary Rococo of the Years 1795–​1830 against the European
Background, 2022).

Luigi Marinelli is Full Professor of Slavistics –​Polish Language and

Literature at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of “Sapienza”
University in Rome. He is the author of more than 250 publications in
several languages, on the theory of literature and translation studies,
Polish and Slavic comparative studies, Polish-​Italian interrelations, Polish
culture and literature from the Middle Ages to the last decades. He is
Doctor honoris causa of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, a foreign
member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and the Polish Academy
of Learning (PAU), and an honorary member of the Literary Association
“Adam Mickiewicz” –​Warsaw and of the Ambrosiana Academy –​Milan.
He has translated literary works by Mikołaj Sęp Szarzyński, Maria
Wirtemberska, Ignacy Krasicki, Aleksander Wat, Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz
Kantor, Stanisław Lem and others from Polish into Italian.

Leonardo Masi studied Polish language and literature at the Universities of

Florence and Milan and Music at the Florence Conservatory. He currently
works at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, where
he headed the Department of Italian Studies for several years. His main
research fields are the relationships between literature and music, Italian-​
Polish relations, and translation practices. He has authored several books
and essays on, for example, Karol Szymanowski, Stanisław Brzozowski,
Federico Fellini, Franco Fortini, Italian and Polish opera, contemporary
poetry and popular music. He has translated into Italian some of the
most important contemporary Polish authors (Tomasz Różycki, Krzysztof
Karasek, Wojciech Bonowicz, Krystyna Dąbrowska, Witold Szabłowski).

Marcello Piacentini received his PhD in Slavistics in 2001 with a dissertation

on medieval studies. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Polish Language
and Literature at the University of Padua (Department of Linguistic and
Literary Studies). He has long been a member of the editorial board of the
journal Ricerche Slavistiche, and more recently of Studi Slavistici. His main
research field concerns medieval Polish literature in relation to European
literature in Latin, with a special focus on apocryphal literature and Polish
translation of Johannes from Hildesheim Historia Trium Regum. Other
fields of interest include cultural and literary relations between Poland and
Italy, and Polish literature of the 1950s and 1960s (e.g. the prose of Marek
Hłasko, and the Polish “New Wave”).
 Notes on Contributors xi

Marcin Wyrembelski holds a degree in Italian philology from the Adam

Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and is currently a lecturer in Polish lan-
guage at the University of Florence. His research interests focus on Italian
and Polish literature of the twentieth century and the art of translation, as
well as teaching Polish as a foreign language. He is a translator of Italian
fiction and non-​fiction prose into Polish (Erri De Luca, Italo Calvino,
Tiziano Terzani, Emilio Salgari) and Polish literature into Italian (Bogdan
Wojdowski, Anna Frajlich, Henryk Grynberg, Anna Świrszczyńska). He
has also conceived and coordinated several translation projects aimed at
students of Polish and Italian.
Acknowledgments

Our sincere thanks go to Gerri Kimber for the proofreading of Andrea

Ceccherelli’s introduction and essay –​“From parody to polemical
pamphlet: Gombrowiczian deformations of Dante,” as well as Luigi
Marinelli’s essay –​“On Czesław Miłosz’s debt to Dante;” to Joanna Pottle
for the proofreading of Francesco Cabras’ essay –​“Dante in Norwid’s
Prayer Book”; to Alex Petrocchi and Sarah Masden for the proofreading
of Andrea De Carlo’s essay –​“Echoes of Inferno V in Kraszewski’s
narrative and lyrical work”; to Neal Putt for the proofreading of Marcello
Piacentini’s essay –​“What Dante owes to Stanisław Barańczak”; to Jessica
Sirotin for the proofreading of Leonardo Masi’s essay –​“Dante in twenty-​
first-​century Poland: the case of Jarosław Mikołajewski.” Thanks go to
John Trzeciak for reading and commenting on a late draft of Krystyna
Jaworska’s essay –​“Słowacki’s Poem of Piast Dantyszek, or the macabre
despair of a father-​land.”
Sincere thanks go to Przemysław Batorski for translating Tomasz
Jędrzejewski’s essay –​“Dante and Mickiewicz. The story of a common
journey” and to Caroline Swinton for translating Marina Ciccarini’s
essay –​“Reason and will: Dante and Krasiński, a comparison.”
Furthermore, regarding the latter, special thanks go to Nina Taylor-​Terlecka
for the translations of quotations from Zygmunt Krasiński’s works.
Special thanks go to the Polish Institute in Rome for supporting the pro-
ject in its initial phase.
Tomasz Jędrzejewski’s text, “Dante and Mickiewicz. The story of a
common journey,” was prepared within the research project “Kultura
literacka polskiego rokoka lat 1795–​ 1830 na tle europejskim” [The
Literary Culture of the Polish Rococo in a European Perspective, 1795–​
1830], No 2016/​23/​D/​HS2/​01119, funded by the National Science Centre,
Poland.
In the whole volume quotations from the Divine Comedy are reported
along The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The Italian Text with a
 Acknowledgments xiii

Translation in English Blank Verse and a Commentary by Courtney

Langdon, 3 volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918, 1920,
1921, available online: https://​oll.libe​rtyf​und.org//​title/​alighi​eri-​the-​div​
ine-​com​edy-​in-​3-​vols-​lang​don-​trans
Unless otherwise noted, all other translations are by the authors of the
essays.
newgenprepdf

Inhuman, transhuman, posthuman

An introduction to Polish Danteism over
the centuries

Andrea Ceccherelli

There is Dantology and there is Danteism. The former is a scholarly discip-

line cultivated by academia; the latter mainly concerns artists and writers
and is conveyed by intertextual allusions and various types of reworking.
The boundaries between Dantology and Danteism are not always clear-​
cut –​translators, for example, occupy a rather liminal position between
both disciplines –​but what is important, beyond any nominal distinction,
is that every act of engaging with Dante occupies a precise moment in
time: Dante’s time for scholars, and their own time for writers. To put it
another way: the scholars’ time is chronos –​objective time; the writers’
time is kairos –​occasion, where actualization prevails over reconstruction,
the Mickiewiczian “feeling” over the “lens and the eye of the sage,” giving
rise to unpredictable creative combinations. In the vector space constituted
by Dante’s interpretations, the writers’ vectors are oriented towards the
present, to “contemporaneity,” which is always a fluid, mobile con-
cept (Mościcki 2022). Dante’s work can therefore be likened to a prism,
refracting the light projected onto it from different angles here and now.
This is true at all times and in all places. As David Damrosch affirms,
drawing on Wai Chee Dimock,

Dante’s poem changes shape as it crosses borders: it is a fundamentally

different work abroad, and even in Italy it was a very different work
for Italo Calvino and Primo Levi in the twentieth century than it was
for Boccaccio in the fourteenth. Yet the Commedia’s effects will always
be shaped by the reader’s powerful sense of it as a poem from a very
different time and place from our own.
(Damrosch 2003, 140)

In Poland, Dante was only truly discovered in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. This is not to say that he was not known before; occasional references
had occurred as early as the fifteenth century (Litwornia 2005), but it
was not until the Romantics that a fruitful intertextual dialogue with him

DOI: 10.4324/9781003333524-1
2 Andrea Ceccherelli

was engendered. All four of the Polish Romantic “bards” –​Mickiewicz,

Słowacki, Krasiński, and Norwid –​offer traces of a profound reading
of Dante in their poetic works (Kuciak 2003). Indeed, two of them –​
Mickiewicz and Norwid –​even tried their hand at translating fragments
of the Divine Comedy, inaugurating a tradition culminating in the recently
acclaimed, innovative version by Jarosław Mikołajewski. Dante’s work
has continued to inspire many prominent Polish writers up to the present
day, including Miłosz and Gombrowicz.
The purpose of this volume, however, is not to formulate a history of
Polish Danteism. Other scholars have recently made valuable contributions
in this regard (Marinelli 2018 and 2022), combining the ability to synthe-
size whilst at the same time indicating possible new paths for research.
What we want to present here is a series of “encounters,” substantiated
by acts of reading that have had creative relapses, encased within multiple
traditions (national or international, monoauthorial or pluriauthorial,
linear or rhizomatic), but which nevertheless are to be viewed as indi-
vidual, unique and unrepeatable hermeneutic acts. Luigi Marinelli (2022
but also here) frames Polish Danteism within a transnational network
made up of lines, nodes, and intertextual vortices; an approach that, in
the perspective of a world literature that is increasingly global, opens up
interesting perspectives of inquiry. If we imagine the worldwide phenom-
enon of Danteism as a complex, interconnected universe conventionally
divided into constellations, then Polish Danteism becomes just one of
these constellations, alongside English, Russian, etc. In this perspective,
interpretive nexuses form horizontal and vertical configurations within
the same linguistic-​cultural tradition, which is, however, renewed and
fertilized by transversal grafts from different fields. We must take into
account that Dante, in Poland as elsewhere, features not only within the
strand of Italianism, of which he constitutes one of the main chapters from
the nineteenth century onward, but in addition is perceived as a compo-
nent of world literature, functioning independently as the “center of the
Western canon” (Harold Bloom) alongside Shakespeare. This is confirmed
by Gombrowicz himself, Dante’s main “rival,” and by the crime scene in
his Diary, where before the assassination Dante and Shakespeare often
appear side by side.
Far from being conceived as a traditional review of Dante’s reception
in terms of translations and scholarly output (Preisner 1957), the present
volume stands rather as a reconstruction of individual artistic and intel-
lectual dialogues with Dante and about Dante, that have taken place over
two centuries, from the early nineteenth century to the present. Why have
Polish writers been inspired by Dante? What motifs have they used? How
have they interpreted them? What role has the figure of the Italian poet
himself played in their work? These are some of the questions the authors
 Inhuman, transhuman, posthuman 3

of the various chapters try to resolve. Here, the focus is placed on specific
reading adventures. Hermeneutic encounters. Lively, even bitterly polem-
ical dialogues with Dante by writers who are not interested in returning
Dante to us in his historical dimension, but rather in bringing him to life,
reading him in their own time, within their own perspectives and reflections
on life and art. Such an approach, aimed at privileging the hermeneutic
dimension, precisely intends to account for those “encounters” that have
led to a variety of original interpretations, inspirations, and intertextual
references.
The first chapter of the volume is devoted to the father of modern Polish
literature, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–​ 1855). Here, Tomasz Jędrzejewski
effectively reconstructs the function of Dantean references via the different
stages of the poet’s life, distinguishing between an initial –​let’s say –​trendy
usage, falling within the typical frame of reference of the Romantic period,
and a later more personal adherence embedded in Mickiewicz’s existen-
tial experience and moral, historical-​political, and theological reflections.
Next, Krystyna Jaworska focuses on one of the three Dante poems by
the most intertextually Dantean of Polish poets, Juliusz Słowacki (1809–​
1849). She reveals the ways in which Słowacki reworks Dantean motifs for
the purpose of actualization, concerning both the role of the poet and the
situation of Polish society at the time, in an overt game of grotesque adap-
tation, even down to the protagonist, Piast Dantyszek, where Piast is the
name of the legendary founder of the first Polish dynasty, and Dantyszek
means “little Dante.” Marina Ciccarini in turn offers a comparative ana-
lysis of the evolution of Zygmunt Krasiński’s (1812–​1859) philosophy of
history, an author so imbued with Danteism that he gave his masterpiece,
written at the age of just twenty, the ironic title of The Undivine Comedy.
It is natural for the Romantics to read their own experiences within a
Dantean interpretive key, as, for example, does Cyprian Kamil Norwid
(1821–​1883), a prisoner of Prussian jails; but for him it is no longer
Hell that is the horizon of reference, immutable and eternal, but rather
Purgatory, a transitory state that prefigures elevation and liberation, as
Francesco Cabras explains in an essay that has the atout of submitting to
interpretation not only the explicit but even more importantly the implicit
intertextuality, that is, the significant lacunae.
In the post-​ Romantic period, two cosmopolitan personalities,
belonging to the history not only of Danteism but also of Dantology,
encountered Dante on a transnational level. Firstly, the novelist Józef
Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–​1887), translated into Polish the entire Divine
Comedy (without publishing it), as well as devoting a series of successful
“lectures” to it in German. His relationship with Dante is absolutely cen-
tral to his oeuvre and is reflected in numerous intertextual references,
traced by Andrea De Carlo with particular attention to the rewritings of
4 Andrea Ceccherelli

the Paolo and Francesca motif. Secondly, Julian Klaczko (1825–​1906),

was an émigré critic whose reading of Dante –​contained in the famous
Florentine Evenings, appreciated by Benedetto Croce –​is analyzed by
Luca Bernardini beginning with some early writings specifically dedicated
to Dante, and culminating in a complex perspective of both historicizing
and actualizing the great Florentine.
Reading Dante also influenced many eminent twentieth-​century writers,
commencing with Stanisław Vincenz (1888–​ 1971), whose essays later
inspired other writers, such as Czesław Miłosz (Ceccherelli 2007 and
2012). As Lorenzo Costantino points out, Vincenz outlined a multifa-
ceted portrait of Dante as an exiled poet, a political poet, a poet evoking
the world of the dead, a poet of popular myths, a poet of tolerance, and
above all a champion of the universalism and multiculturalism that are
for Vincenz the basis of an idea of Europe characterized by dialogue, the
defense of minority cultures, and tolerance. In turn, Marcin Wyrembelski
analyzes the Dantean motifs in the works of Teodor Parnicki (1908–​1988),
with a special focus on his most renowned historical novel, Only Beatrice,
set in fourteenth-​century Florence, highlighting some possible interpretive
paths in a Dantean key, isolated within the forest of symbols, references,
and allusions that characterize Parnicki’s prose.
Twentieth-​century Polish Danteism can boast of such great writers as
Witold Gombrowicz (1904–​1969), who attacked Dante in a controversial
pamphlet that aroused scandalized reactions oscillating between blatant
indignation and embarrassed silence, and Czesław Miłosz (1911–​2004),
who repeatedly referred to Dante in his reflections on poetry and meta-
physical imagination. The presence and function of Dante in Gombrowicz’s
work is the focus of Andrea Ceccherelli’s essay, beginning with the novel
Ferdydurke, in which he highlights the overt but also covert presence of
Dante, going so far as to interpret it as a “degraded Commedia,” to the
pages of the 1966 Diary, which hide a philological mystification, since
Gombrowicz disguises Dante before blatantly “correcting” him, so that
he performs a double rewriting of the incipit of Inferno III: the first
dissimulated, the second declared. Miłosz’s Danteism –​particularly intense
and enduring, founded not on an episodic encounter, not on this or that
borrowing or adaptation, but rather on a debt of reflection, accumulated
over many years of engagement –​is interpreted by Luigi Marinelli against
the background of intersections, or nodes, with other intertextual and
cross-​cultural lines involving “writers-​bridges” between different cultures,
all of them translingual and expatriates, such as Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, Stanisław Brzozowski, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney,
Oscar Milosz, and also Gombrowicz, whose arguments, expressed in a
provocative way, Miłosz addressed, by tracing them back to their serious
philosophical essence.
 Inhuman, transhuman, posthuman 5

Subsequent generations have continued to engage with Dante in various

ways, including translation. The most virtuosic translator of the twentieth
century, Stanisław Barańczak (1946–​2014), could not refrain from testing
his own abilities in tackling Dante’s tercets, although his is rather a missed
encounter, as Marcello Piacentini demonstrates. Jarosław Mikołajewski
(1960) is the author of a recent innovative translation of the Divine
Comedy, which matured over a span of more than thirty years; Leonardo
Masi performs a reconnaissance of Dantean motifs in Mikołajewski’s
literary production, noting how both the writer’s original work and his
translation of the Commedia intersected for three decades, influencing
each other and finding the closest relationship within the genre of rep-
ortage, which Mikołajewski has been cultivating under the influence of
two great authorities –​Dante and Ryszard Kapuściński –​and which also
strongly affects his translation strategy.
Such “encounters” do not, of course, exhaust Dante’s living presence
in Polish literature. Elsewhere, Marinelli (2022) analyzes Dante’s sparse
presence in Różewicz, Szymborska, and Herbert, in terms of an ironic ref-
erence, always recognizable within the framework of the anxiety of influ-
ence. Other names of poets are given by Leonardo Masi, such as that
of Agnieszka Kuciak (1970), herself a translator of the Divine Comedy,
Wojciech Wencel (1972), controversial author of religious poetry under
the elective patronage of T. S. Eliot, and especially Tomasz Różycki
(1970), a leading exponent of the mid generation whose work is littered
with Dantean intertextual signifiers, including his recent collection The
Beekeeper’s Hand (Ręka pszczelarza, 2022).
Lastly, the remarks dedicated to Dante by the 2018 Nobel laureate
Olga Tokarczuk in an interview (still unpublished) carried out in 2021
in Bologna, reveal how Dante remains a point of reference –​voluntary
or involuntary, positive or negative, by apposition or opposition –​even
for those whose Weltanschauung is worlds apart from Dante’s humanism,
having replaced the ideal of “transhumanizing” (Paradiso I, 70) with
“posthumanizing.” There is no shortage of –​mainly hidden –​references to
Dante in Tokarczuk’s work: of interest is, for example, the one contained
in her “Łódź Lectures” where, commenting on The Books of Jacob, she
speaks of a “purgatory land of untold stories” from which derives the his-
tory of the Frankists narrated in The Books; the idea, as she explains in the
interview, is to add a terrace to Purgatory where the souls of the departed
can purify themselves by telling the stories that for various reasons they
could not relate during their lifetimes –​alternative stories than those
propounded by the ruling classes, for example narrated from the point
of view of women, or of nonhuman beings and entities, such as animals,
plants, and landscape elements. Comparative research has revealed several
common themes that appear to be central to the works of both Tokarczuk
6 Andrea Ceccherelli

and Dante, although addressed in very different ways. One of them is cer-
tainly wandering. This is what Tokarczuk claims:

In a way I envy Dante, because his wanderer traveled in a world that

was extremely orderly, just, a world that was a certain sensible whole.
My narrator [in Flights] travels in a world that is unknowable, asym-
metrical, disorderly, chaotic, baffling. One doesn’t know how to com-
prehend it; one doesn’t know what criteria to use to live in it. These
characters: the hero Dante and my heroine-​narrator are united by the
fact that they are in motion, they are constantly on the move, changing
more spheres, places of the world, and trying to figure out some sense
of the world. While Dante succeeds, because in essence a vision of the
world emerges that is extremely convincing, coherent, at the end of my
book there is no definite answer. There is only the suggestion that we
live in chaos, and, as in Leonardo’s painting [Saint John the Baptist]
mentioned in Flights, we only see the finger that points to some order to
which we have no access.
(Tokarczuk 2021)

Thinking about her own book The Lost Soul, a children’s parable whose
title recalls Dante’s story in the Comedy, Tokarczuk continues her Dante-​
inspired reflections:

What is for us today the dark forest we walk through? In the world
of Dante, I think it was a search for justice, for some sense of moral
order. Dante lived in a much more violent world than ours, and always
the answer to the surrounding violence is a search for justice. I think
that today there is less of this violence in the world, but there are other
dangers. If I had to answer this question, I would say that I am someone
raised on the values of the Enlightenment, so for me this dark forest
and this wandering and this search that I have to undertake is about
the fact that my duty is to understand the world, though not with the
help of some dead, artificial tools and experiments, not with some sci-
entism, but rather with the search for other, living points of view on this
reality: animal, not human, perhaps plant; and to see the world anew
once again.
(Tokarczuk 2021)

The itinerary of Polish Danteism, which began in the nineteenth century

with interpretive paths characterized by internal, national connotations
(Salwa 2001, 187), then opened up in the twentieth century to new her-
meneutic horizons, from Vincenz’s epic dimension to Gombrowicz’s
ethical scandal and Miłosz’s metaphysical nostalgia, thus culminates
 Inhuman, transhuman, posthuman 7

(temporarily) in the year 2021, the seventh centenary of the death of the
Supreme Poet, with two unprecedented stages: a revolutionary translation
conceived as a “reportage from the other world” and an hermeneutic act
of o/​apposition under the aegis of alternative storytelling and posthuman
fantasy, proving that in Poland Dante is still a living presence and, at the
same time, a disturbing monument (Salwa 2001 and 2012).

References
Ceccherelli, Andrea. 2007. “Miłosz e Dante.” In Italia Polonia Europa. Scritti
in memoria di Andrzej Litwornia, edited by Andrea Ceccherelli, Elżbieta
Jastrzębowska, Luigi Marinelli, Marcello Piacentini, Anton Maria Raffo, and
Giorgio Ziffer, 98–​113. Roma: Accademia Polacca delle Scienze Biblioteca e
Centro di Studi a Roma.
Ceccherelli, Andrea. 2012. “Poeta zaświatu przedstawionego: Dante u Miłosza.”
Świat Tekstów. Rocznik Słupski, no. 10, 165–​178.
Damrosch, David. 2003. What is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press.
Kuciak, Agnieszka. 2003. Dante Romantyków. Recepcja Boskiej Komedii u
Mickiewicza, Słowackiego, Krasińsiego i Norwida. Poznań: Wydawnictwo
Naukowe UAM.
Litwornia, Andrzej. 2005. “Dantego któż się odważy tłumaczyć?”. Studia o
recepcji Dantego w Polsce. Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich PAN.
Marinelli, Luigi. 2018. “Polish Dantism between Epic and Ethics.” Roczniki
Humanistyczne 66 (1): 33–​71.
Marinelli, Luigi. 2022. Noster hic est Dantes. Su Dante e il dantismo in Polonia.
Roma: Lithos Editore.
Mościcki, Paweł. 2022. Wyższa aktualność. O współczesności Dantego.
Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego.
Preisner, Walerian. 1957. Dante i jego dzieła w Polsce. Bibliografia krytyczna z
historycznym wstępem. Toruń: Towarzystwo Naukowe w Toruniu.
Salwa, Piotr. 2001. “Dante in Polonia: una presenza viva?” Dante Studies, with the
Annual Report of the Dante Society, no. 119, 187–​202.
Salwa, Piotr. 2012. “Dante in Poland: A Disturbing Monument.” In Like Doves
Summoned by Desire. Dante’s New Life in the 20th Century Literature and
Cinema. Essays in Memory of Amilcare Iannucci, edited by Massimo Ciavolella
and Gianluca Rizzo, 219–​238. New York: Agincourt Press.
Tokarczuk, Olga. 2021. “Olga Tokarczuk incontra Dante [Olga Tokarczuk
encounters Dante].” An interview conducted by Andrea Ceccherelli on June 9,
2021, Bologna, Sala dell’Archiginnasio. Unpublished.
1 Dante and Mickiewicz
The story of a common journey

Tomasz Jędrzejewski

Approaches to Mickiewicz’s Danteism. A reconnaissance

Several studies have been written on the Dante-​ Mickiewicz relation-
ship. In the late nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth
century, Lucjan Siemieński (1880), Ignacy Chrzanowski (1921), Juliusz
Kleiner (1921, 1930), and Wincenty Lutosławski (1937) devoted works
to this issue. The findings of researchers from this period are crowned and
supplemented by Zygmunt Sitnicki’s (1948) extensive article “Mickiewicz
and Dante.” Sitnicki was primarily interested in identifying the motivic
similarities between Mickiewicz’s works and the Divine Comedy. The
researcher pointed out many such similarities, which led him to a bold
conclusion:

The above findings have serious consequences for the genesis of both
our poet’s own work and the entire Romantic poetry in Poland. For
it is known that in the study of literature there is still a lingering view
that this poetry derives primarily from the Germanic spirit. … We
have found out … that the “starting point” for Mickiewicz was also
dantemania, the beginnings of which should be traced back at least to
the spring of 1820. … It follows that the author of the Divine Comedy
can be rightly considered, if not the first, then at least one of the first
“godfathers” of Polish Romanticism.
(Sitnicki 1948, 372–​73)

The scholar argued that the Polish poet found an important source of
inspiration in Dante’s work almost throughout his entire creative activity.
These recognitions made within the methodological framework of the
theory of influence aroused the suspicions of other literary historians: a lot
of alleged evidence of Mickiewicz’s fascination with Dante –​both in terms
of the motifs used and the conceptual assumptions of individual works –​
could have originated in the so-​called spirit of the age or constituted a

DOI: 10.4324/9781003333524-2
 Dante and Mickiewicz 9

Dantean motif processed by other Romantic poets. These objections were

noted by later scholars of Danteism in Polish Romantic literature (Brahmer
1958; Szmydtowa 1964; Stefanowska 1976; Kuciak 2003). A signifi-
cant part of Sitnicki’s claims were questioned or outright rejected. In any
case, there can be no question of Dantemania or Dantean beginning of
Polish Romanticism. And not only because it is not visible in Mickiewicz’s
youthful texts, but also because Dante appears no more than marginally
in Polish poetry and criticism around 1820. It is also difficult to agree with
Sitnicki’s statement that the Italian writer was a patron to the Polish poet
in the creation of all major poems and dramas (the author of the article
“Mickiewicz and Dante” does not see Dante’s influence only in the poem
Grażyna) and many minor works.
After the Second World War, the issue was revisited several times.
Zofia Szmydtowa (1964) wrote about the relationship between Dante
and Mickiewicz in her essay “Dante and Polish Romanticism” and Zofia
Stefanowska (1976) in her study “On the Dantesqueness of the third part
of ‘Forefathers Eve’.” Both texts focus on Dresden Forefathers’ Eve, where
motifs and ideas of real or alleged Dantean origin are most abundant.
Szmydtowa and Stefanowska, skeptical of the scale of Sitnicki’s theses,
assumed that if we wanted to find Danteism in Mickiewicz, we should
look for it in the third part of the drama. Szmydtowa compared the vision
of Father Peter (announcement of the mysterious “Forty and Four”)
with the prophecy of the coming of the future savior of Italy (“a Five
Hundred Ten and Five sent forth by God,” Purgatorio XXXIII, 43). The
intercession of the mother praying for Konrad reminded the researcher
of Beatrice’s prayer, and Mickiewicz’s hero giving himself to the enemy’s
hands was associated with Dante’s wandering around the circles of Hell
and Purgatory, thanks to which the hero of the Divine Comedy cleansed
himself of sin and emerged from the tangled ways of life on a straight path
of salvation (Canto XXIV of Paradise). Other motivic parallels were added
to the indicated convergences: like the devils from the eighth circle of Hell
(Canto XXI), Mickiewicz’s devils quarrel over the Senator’s soul. “So,
the analogies concern the general concept of Konrad’s spiritual rebirth,
the atmosphere of some images, the portrayal of devils and their tricks,”
concludes Szmydtowa (1964, 327). Stefanowska, on the other hand, sees
a Dantean provenance in the scenes of the Doctor’s and Bajkow’s torments
in hell, but at the same time legitimately asks whether representations of
hellish horror must necessarily refer us to the Divine Comedy (Inferno
XXV), or whether other sources (for example local folk poetry) were
not a closer inspiration for the poet (Stefanowska 1976, 66). Particularly
important seems to me Stefanowska’s recognition of the historiosophical
dimension of Forefathers’ Eve read in the perspective of the Christian
interpretation of history, which is also present in the Divine Comedy. At
10 Tomasz Jędrzejewski

this point, I am only signaling this problem and will return to it later in
the study.
The issue of Mickiewicz’s Danteism was most extensively examined by
Agnieszka Kuciak (2003). The researcher found a middle way between the
bold approach of Sitnicki and the cautious approach of Szmydtowa and
Stefanowska. In addition to drawing motivic, ideological, and imaginative
parallels between Alighieri and the Polish authors, Kuciak’s book features
valuable pieces of interpretation. The scholar meticulously confronted
the texts of Dante and, among others, Mickiewicz, discussed the ways in
which the Polish author processes various ideas potentially taken from
Dante, and pointed to the shifts of meaning resulting from Mickiewicz’s
modification of Dantean motifs. Among other things, she conducted a
convincing interpretation of the poem “I Dreamt of Winter…” (“Śniła się
zima…”), inspired by fragments of the Divine Comedy (Cantos XXX–​
XXXIII of Purgatorio). Kuciak’s unifying conclusion sounds restrained.
The researcher repeats Stefanowska’s balanced opinion: the similarities we
see between the Divine Comedy and Mickiewicz’s work are often possible
without the relationship of influence:

there is a certain pressure on his [Mickiewicz’s] “Dantesqueness” in

the state of research, not devoid of justification, although sometimes
it is … analogy rather than tangible “influence.” Dante is one of the
“Romantics”: what connects [them] with him is the feeling of a living
bond between the living and the dead (Forefathers’ Eve), the ideal-
ization of love (Part IV of Forefathers’ Eve, I Dreamt of Winter), the
importance of faith, mysticism, universalism, messianism.
(Kuciak 2003, 27)

In this study, I would like to draw attention to an issue that, in my opinion,

has not been sufficiently taken into account in the previous descriptions of
Mickiewicz’s Danteism. I will be interested in how the life situation of
the Polish poet, the circles in which he moved and the political events he
witnessed influenced the attitude towards Dante and the Divine Comedy.
Therefore, my intention is not exclusively philological (that is, it is not
based –​as in the case of Sitnicki’s article or Kuciak’s monograph –​on the
confrontation of texts and the verification of the source of inspiration). I try
to delve into the problems of Mickiewicz’s evolving creative awareness, his
approach to literary tradition and his self-​creation –​of course considered
from the Dantological point of view. I will base my study on specific texts,
but in the analysis I will focus on how the influence of the Divine Comedy
on the work of the author of Forefathers’ Eve changed over time due to
different biographical and historical determinants. I would like to highlight
 Dante and Mickiewicz 11

the dynamics of Mickiewicz’s perception (and artistic use) of Dante’s

work. I will distinguish three phases of Danteism, or –​metaphorically
speaking –​three stages of Mickiewicz’s common journey with Dante. For
the Polish poet, during the Vilnius-​Kaunas period Dante is someone other
than Dante read in Russia and later during the emigration.

First part of the common journey: the Divine Comedy among

“different pieces of russet cloth”
I will recall a few facts about Dante’s reception in Vilnius in Mickiewicz’s
time (after 1815). A sign of interest in Alighieri’s work in the literature of
Polish Romanticism is Józef Sękowski’s publication in the journal Dziennik
Wileński. It was an excerpt from his translation of Inferno, preceded by
a note about the life and poetry of the author of the Divine Comedy
(Sękowski 1817). Sękowski’s work seems episodic. The Italian genius was
not admired by Polish writers of the late Enlightenment (Kuciak 2003,
15–​16; Litwornia 2005a, 108–​39; Marinelli 2018). It is true that Dante
was not criticized too much, but he was not given much attention either.
In Vilnius, a few concise favorable remarks about Dante were recorded
by Euzebiusz Słowacki in an academic lecture on “the theory of taste”
(written several years before Sękowski’s translation):

The first eminent author of epic poetry in the common language was
Dante Alighieri, who wrote a poem entitled Comedy. This poem consists
of one hundred songs placed in three divisions, that is: Hell, Purgatory
and Paradise. Although the composition of the work contradicts the
rules of the epic, and often insults sense and taste, it is nevertheless rich
in poetic beauties of the first order.
(Słowacki 1826, 111)

Dante is mentioned by Leon Borowski, Słowacki’s successor to the chair of

rhetoric and poetry, in his competition thesis of 1820:

This strange mixture of the teachings of the Catholic religion with the
inventions of the ancient world is evidently seen in Dante’s Comedy
and proves a considerable change in the popular way of thinking at
that time. This spirit of freedom acted in a still more fortunate way for
Petrarch’s talent.
(Borowski 1972, 68)

And further: “Today we are struck by the multitude of poetic freedoms

in Dante’s Comedy, which, however, in their time made the poet very
12 Tomasz Jędrzejewski

popular. … In Dante’s strange work emerged all his genius, his heart,
passions, age and learning” (ibid., 69–​73). We know from the memoirs
of Antoni Edward Odyniec (1884, 154) that Borowski praised the trans-
lation of the Divine Comedy by Julian Korsak: “[Korsak] especially
immortalized his name in national literature with his rhymed translation
of Dante’s Divine Comedy, about which Borowski once said: ‘it smells
like Dante’.” However, we do not know the exact time when Borowski
said his compliment, and we do not know when Korsak began his transla-
tion work. It could not have happened before 1823, when the young poet
from Słonim entered the Faculty of Literature and Liberal Arts of Vilnius
University, and not after 1826, when Korsak left Vilnius (Makowiecka
1968–​9; Litwornia 2005a, 171–​77).
Generally speaking, in Vilnius of Mickiewicz’s time (1815–​1824) there
were attempts to read Dante by both scholars and translators, but their
commentaries are rare and small in volume. In the statements of poetry
theorists, appreciation for Alighieri is mixed with the reserve characteristic
of those enlightened towards the medieval “insult of taste.” The Divine
Comedy does not evoke any special emotions. This is evidenced by the
fact that in the fifteen years of the existence of Dziennik Wileński (1815–​
1830), the most important Vilnius journal publishing literature and lit-
erary criticism, Dante appeared in its pages only once! Jan Śniadecki does
not refer to Dante in his 1819 anti-​Romantic diatribe, which criticized the
medieval lack of taste (Śniadecki 1819).
How and when did Dante come into Mickiewicz’s awareness and work?
What is certain is that during his studies at the Vilnius University, the Polish
poet at least came across the Divine Comedy. It could have been during
the classes of Borowski. Luigi Capelli, the lecturer of Italian literature (and
law), probably played a role. This role was not great, because in his course
the scholar downplayed the importance of the poem. “Unfortunately, it is
not entirely known what Professor Luigi Capelli passed on to his students
from Dante, who certainly had some influence on Mickiewicz’s general
knowledge of Italian literature. Dante was not polished enough to intro-
duce him to Vilnius students,” notes Kuciak (2003, 16). Neither from
Borowski, nor from Capelli, nor from other figures did the young poet
from Vilnius gain sympathy for the Italian master. In the correspondence
and in other materials of the Society of Philomaths, there are no reflections
on Dante. Nevertheless, the poet must have had some awareness of Dante’s
importance around 1820, since in the preface to the first volume of Poetry
(Poezje) from 1822 he was able to paint a broad picture of the emer-
gence of Romanticism in European culture (Salvadè 2017). Mickiewicz
mentions Dante’s work in one sentence of the preface, distancing himself
from the schematic classifications dividing writers of all eras into Classical
and Romantic:
 Dante and Mickiewicz 13

Then, on the one hand, the Iliad stands next to the Henriad, hymns
in honor of the Olympian heroes next to French odes to Posterity, to
Time, etc.; on the other side, Heldenbuch and Nibelungen meet Dante’s
Divine Comedy and Schiller’s songs.
(Mickiewicz 1999, 124–​25)

In the preface, the poet also included another sentence which is of key
importance from the Dantological point of view. Alighieri’s name is not
mentioned, but Mickiewicz points out that the true Romanticism is that
which existed in the Middle Ages: “properly Romantic works, in the full
sense of the word, should be sought among the writings of the poets of the
Middle Ages” (Mickiewicz 1999, 124). Thus, Dante may be regarded as
one of the most outstanding representatives of the “proper” Romanticism,
i.e. the Romanticism of the Middle Ages. And it is worth emphasizing that
in the Vilnius-​Kaunas period, Mickiewicz had a complex attitude towards
these medieval traditions (Sitnicki 1948, 336).1 He was interested in them,
but rather as a resource of motifs suitable for artistic modification; there is
no longing for the distant past. The author of Ballads and Romances then
remained a student of his enlightened teachers, for whom the progress of
arts and sciences, “crafts and skills,” is of civilizational value. Among his
favorite authors are not the poets of “proper” Romanticism, including
Dante, but representatives of its second, modern variety: Friedrich Schiller
and George Byron (Witkowska 1962). I would be inclined to the thesis
that young Mickiewicz recognized the greatness of the Italian poet, but
it was not a greatness that had a strong influence on the work of this
outstanding student at Vilnius University. The similarity of selected
motifs from the ballads (such as evocations of hell’s torments) probably
do not have Dantean provenance. A closer context here seems to be the
inspirations of folk art mixed with the traditions of the European Gothic
ballad (Brahmer 1958; Pluta 2017, 13–​83).
More questions and doubts arise when defining the relation of the
Vilnius-​Kaunas Forefathers’ Eve to Dante’s work. The second part of the
drama resembles –​as Józef Tretiak noticed –​a miniature Divine Comedy
(Tretiak 1884, 49). There are literary evocations of three spheres of post-
humous life: hell, purgatory and paradise. There are also characters that
resemble Dantean figures, such as the Specter, a master who was heartless
towards peasants (Kleiner 1948, 374). Although the Vilnius-​ Kaunas
Forefathers’ Eve shows some similarities with Dante’s work, they are
still not clear evidence of Mickiewicz’s interest in the Divine Comedy.
Moreover, we encounter significant discrepancies. Kuciak sums up:

Given the rather general … similarity of the second part of Forefathers’

Eve to the Divine Comedy in the idea of the bond between the
14 Tomasz Jędrzejewski

living and the dead and intercession … it is impossible not to notice

how different its eschatological concept is from Dante’s. Among
Mickiewicz’s needy souls there are not only purgatory souls, but also
souls close to paradise and hell, and they need not only prayers, but
also food and experiences (love, care, bitterness) that would complete
their unfulfilled existence.
(Kuciak 2003, 19–​20)

Even if we recognize in Mickiewicz’s images the artistic debt owed to

Dante –​the theme of “villainous books” (“książki zbójeckie”) from
the fourth part of the drama can be associated with Dante’s story of
Paolo and Francesca from Inferno, V (Kleiner 1948, 376; Sitnicki
1948, 342; Kuciak 2003, 20) –​it is worth remembering a more general
matter. Regardless of the number of identified references, in the Vilnius-​
Kaunas Forefathers’ Eve Mickiewicz “makes use” of Dante, just as in
this period he makes use of all other authors. The young poet does not
explore the mysteries of the afterlife and keeps a distance from Romantic
metaphysics. He juxtaposes, “stitches” poets’ texts, plays with existing
conventions, mixes the high with the low. As Michał Kuziak pointed out,
the poet struggles with the modern problem of the disintegration of lan-
guage, which is unable to describe the modern world (the one from the
beginning of the nineteenth century) and individual experience (Kuziak
2013). For the young Mickiewicz, there is no single book explaining
the world and the condition of human being –​neither the Bible nor any
other canonical text of culture. The idea of the Book was replaced by
“villainous books.” In the textual universe of the young Mickiewicz,
Dante functions like other authors, from whose works one can detach –​
using the language of Forefathers’ Eve –​some “different pieces of russet
cloth” (“różne kawałki sukmany”). If Dante appears, fragments of his
work are placed in a mosaic of texts from various eras and literatures.
I think that in the Vilnius-​Kaunas period, Mickiewicz did not find any-
thing particularly absorbing in Alighieri’s work. The Italian author
turned out to be, firstly, antiquated, secondly, culturally distant, thirdly,
too monumental. It is significant that in Magdalena Bąk’s monograph
(2004) aimed at showing Mickiewicz’s reading horizons in the Vilnius
period, the name of Dante does not appear even once (for comparison,
Byron appears 60 times and Schiller 100 times). The only unquestionable
reference to Alighieri’s poetry –​the motto of an occasional poem for
Maryla Wereszczakówna (“There is no greater pain than to remember
happy days in day of misery,” Inferno V, 121–​123, quoted in Italian) –​
does not seem to me particularly original and would be possible without
reading the Divine Comedy at all.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Answer, please
answer
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Answer, please answer

Author: Ben Bova

Illustrator: George Schelling

Release date: November 28, 2023 [eBook #72247]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company,

1962

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANSWER,

PLEASE ANSWER ***
 Answer, Please Answer

By BEN BOVA

Illustrated by SCHELLING

Astronomer Bova draws upon the facts of his field to

weave a story that will grip your emotions and tantalize
your mind—long after you have finished reading it.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories October 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
We had been at the South Pole a week. The outside thermometer
read fifty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The winter was just
beginning.
"What do you think we should transmit to McMurdo?" I asked Rizzo.
He put down his magazine and half-sat up in his bunk. For a moment
there was silence, except for the nearly inaudible hum of the
machinery that jammed our tiny dome, and the muffled shrieking of
the ever-present wind, above us.
Rizzo looked at the semi-circle of control consoles, computers, and
meteorological sensors with an expression of disgust that could be
produced only by a drafted soldier.
"Tell 'em it's cold, it's gonna get colder, and we've both got
appendicitis and need replacements immediately."
"Very clever," I said, and started touching the buttons that would
automatically transmit the sensors' memory tapes.
Rizzo sagged back into his bunk. "Why?" He asked the curved
ceiling of our cramped quarters. "Why me? Why here? What did I
ever do to deserve spending the whole goddammed winter at the
goddammed South Pole?"
"It's strictly impersonal," I assured him. "Some bright young
meteorologist back in Washington has convinced the Pentagon that
the South Pole is the key to the world's weather patterns. So here
we are."
"It doesn't make sense," Rizzo continued, unhearing. His dark,
broad-boned face was a picture of wronged humanity. "Everybody
knows that when the missiles start flying, they'll be coming over the
North Pole.... The goddammed Army is a hundred and eighty
degrees off base."
"That's about normal for the Army, isn't it?" I was a drafted soldier,
too.
Rizzo swung out of the bunk and paced across the dimly-lit room. It
only took a half-dozen paces; the dome was small and most of it was
devoted to machinery.
"Don't start acting like a caged lion," I warned. "It's going to be a long
winter."
"Yeah, guess so." He sat down next to me at the radio console and
pulled a pack of cigarets from his shirt pocket. He offered one to me,
and we both smoked in silence for a minute or two.
"Got anything to read?"
I grinned. "Some microspool catalogues of stars."
"Stars?"
"I'm an astronomer ... at least, I was an astronomer, before the
National Emergency was proclaimed."
Rizzo looked puzzled. "But I never heard of you."
"Why should you?"
"I'm an astronomer too."
"I thought you were an electronicist."
He pumped his head up and down. "Yeah ... at the radio astronomy
observatory at Greenbelt. Project OZMA. Where do you work?"
"Lick Observatory ... with the 120-inch reflector."
"Oh ... an optical astronomer."
"Certainly."
"You're the first optical man I've met." He looked at me a trifle
queerly.
I shrugged. "Well, we've been around a few millennia longer than
you static-scanners."
"Yeah, guess so."

"I didn't realize that Project OZMA was still going on. Have you had
any results yet?"
It was Rizzo's turn to shrug. "Nothing yet. The project has been
shelved for the duration of the emergency, of course. If there's no
war, and the dish doesn't get bombed out, we'll try again."
"Still listening to the same two stars?"
"Yeah ... Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. They're the only two Sun-type
stars within reasonable range that might have planets like Earth."
"And you expect to pick up radio signals from an intelligent race."
"Hope to."
I flicked the ash off my cigaret. "You know, it always struck me as
rather hopeless ... trying to find radio signals from intelligent
creatures."
"Whattaya mean, hopeless?"
"Why should an intelligent race send radio signals out into interstellar
space?" I asked. "Think of the power it requires, and the likelihood
that it's all wasted effort, because there's no one within range to talk
to."
"Well ... it's worth a try, isn't it ... if you think there could be intelligent
creatures somewhere else ... on a planet of another star."
"Hmph. We're trying to find another intelligent race; are we
transmitting radio signals?"
"No," he admitted. "Congress wouldn't vote the money for a
transmitter that big."
"Exactly," I said. "We're listening, but not transmitting."
Rizzo wasn't discouraged. "Listen, the chances—just on statistical
figuring alone—the chances are that there're millions of other solar
systems with intelligent life. We've got to try contacting them! They
might have knowledge that we don't have ... answers to questions
that we can't solve yet...."
"I completely agree," I said. "But listening for radio signals is the
wrong way to do it."
"Huh?"
"Radio broadcasting requires too much power to cover interstellar
distances efficiently. We should be looking for signals, not listening
for them."
"Looking?"
"Lasers," I said, pointing to the low-key lights over the consoles.
"Optical lasers. Super-lamps shining out in the darkness of the void.
Pump in a modest amount of electrical power, excite a few trillion
atoms, and out comes a coherent, pencil-thin beam of light that can
be seen for millions of miles."
"Millions of miles aren't lightyears," Rizzo muttered.
"We're rapidly approaching the point where we'll have lasers capable
of lightyear ranges. I'm sure that some intelligent race somewhere in
this galaxy has achieved the necessary technology to signal from
star to star—by light beams."
"Then how come we haven't seen any?" Rizzo demanded.
"Perhaps we already have."
"What?"
"We've observed all sorts of variable stars—Cepheids, RR Lyrae's, T
Tauri's. We assume that what we see are stars, pulsating and
changing brightness for reasons that are natural, but unexplainable
to us. Now, suppose what we are really viewing are laser beams,
signalling from planets that circle stars too faint to be seen from
Earth?"
In spite of himself, Rizzo looked intrigued.
"It would be fairly simple to examine the spectra of such light
sources and determine whether they're natural stars or artificial laser
beams."
"Have you tried it?"
I nodded.
"And?"
I hesitated long enough to make him hold his breath, waiting for my
answer. "No soap. Every variable star I've examined is a real star."
He let out his breath in a long, disgusted puff. "Ahhh, you were
kidding all along. I thought so."
"Yes," I said. "I suppose I was."
Time dragged along in the weather dome. I had managed to
smuggle a small portable telescope along with me, and tried to make
observations whenever possible. But the weather was usually too
poor. Rizzo, almost in desperation for something to do, started to
build an electronic image-amplifier for me.
Our one link with the rest of the world was our weekly radio message
from McMurdo. The times for the messages were randomly
scrambled, so that the chances of their being intercepted or jammed
were lessened. And we were ordered to maintain strict radio silence.
As the weeks sloughed on, we learned that one of our manned
satellites had been boarded by the Reds at gunpoint. Our space-
crews had put two Red automated spy-satellites out of commission.
Shots had been exchanged on an ice-island in the Arctic. And six
different nations were testing nuclear bombs.
We didn't get any mail of course. Our letters would be waiting for us
at McMurdo when we were relieved. I thought about Gloria and our
two children quite a bit, and tried not to think about the blast and
fallout patterns in the San Francisco area, where they were.
"My wife hounded me until I spent pretty nearly every damned cent I
had on a shelter, under the house," Rizzo told me. "Damned shelter
is fancier than the house. She's the social leader of the disaster set.
If we don't have a war, she's gonna feel damned silly."
I said nothing.
The weather cleared and steadied for a while (days and nights were
indistinguishable during the long Antarctic winter) and I split my time
evenly between monitoring the meteorological sensors and
observing the stars. The snow had covered the dome completely, of
course, but our "snorkel" burrowed through it and out into the air.
"This dome's just like a submarine, only we're submerged in snow
instead of water," Rizzo observed. "I just hope we don't sink to the
bottom."
"The calculations show that we'll be all right."
He made a sour face. "Calculations proved that airplanes would
never get off the ground."
The storms closed in again, but by the time they cleared once more,
Rizzo had completed the image-amplifier for me. Now, with the tiny
telescope I had, I could see almost as far as a professional
instrument would allow. I could even lie comfortably in my bunk,
watch the amplifier's viewscreen, and control the entire set-up
remotely.
Then it happened.
At first it was simply a curiosity. An oddity.

I happened to be studying a Cepheid variable star—one of the huge,

very bright stars that pulsate so regularly that you can set your watch
by them. It had attracted my attention because it seemed to be
unusually close for a Cepheid—only 700 lightyears away. The
distance could be easily gauged by timing the star's pulsations.[1]
I talked Rizzo into helping me set up a spectrometer. We scavenged
shamelessly from the dome's spare parts bin and finally produced an
instrument that would break up the light of the star into its
component wavelengths, and thereby tell us much about the star's
chemical composition and surface temperature.
At first I didn't believe what I saw.
The star's spectrum—a broad rainbow of colors—was criss-crossed
with narrow dark lines. That was all right. They're called absorption
lines; the Sun has thousands of them in its spectrum. But one line—
one—was an insolently bright emission line. All the laws of physics
and chemistry said it couldn't be there.
But it was.
We photographed the star dozens of times. We checked our
instruments ceaselessly. I spent hours scanning the star's "official"
spectrum in the microspool reader. The bright emission line was not
on the catalogue spectrum. There was nothing wrong with our
instruments.
Yet the bright line showed up. It was real.
"I don't understand it," I admitted. "I've seen stars with bright
emission spectra before, but a single bright line in an absorption
spectrum! It's unheard-of. One single wavelength ... one particular
type of atom at one precise energy-level ... why? Why is it emitting
energy when the other wavelengths aren't?"
Rizzo was sitting on his bunk, puffing a cigaret. He blew a cloud of
smoke at the low ceiling. "Maybe it's one of those laser signals you
were telling me about a couple weeks ago."
I scowled at him. "Come on, now. I'm serious. This thing has me
puzzled."
"Now wait a minute ... you're the one who said radio astronomers
were straining their ears for nothing. You're the one who said we
ought to be looking. So look!" He was enjoying his revenge.
I shook my head, and turned back to the meteorological equipment.
But Rizzo wouldn't let up. "Suppose there's an intelligent race living
on a planet near a Cepheid variable star. They figure that any other
intelligent creatures would have astronomers who'd be curious about
their star, right? So they send out a laser signal that matches the
star's pulsations. When you look at the star, you see their signal.
What's more logical?"
"All right," I groused. "You've had your joke...."
"Tell you what," he insisted. "Let's put that one wavelength into an
oscilloscope and see if a definite signal comes out. Maybe it'll spell
out 'Take me to your leader' or something."

I ignored him and turned my attention to Army business. The

meteorological equipment was functioning perfectly, but our orders
read that one of us had to check it every twelve hours. So I checked
and tried to keep my eyes from wandering as Rizzo tinkered with a
photocell and oscilloscope.
"There we are," he said, at length. "Now let's see what they're telling
us."
In spite of myself I looked up at the face of the oscilloscope. A
steady, gradually sloping greenish line was traced across the screen.
"No message," I said.
Rizzo shrugged elaborately.
"If you leave the 'scope on for two days, you'll find that the line
makes a full swing from peak to null," I informed him. "The star
pulsates every two days, bright to dim."
"Let's turn up the gain," he said, and he flicked a few knobs on the
front of the 'scope.
The line didn't change at all.
"What's the sweep speed?" I asked.
"One nanosecond per centimeter." That meant that each centimeter-
wide square on the screen's face represented one billionth of a
second. There are as many nanoseconds in one second as there are
seconds in thirty-two years.
"Well, if you don't get a signal at that sensitivity, there just isn't any
signal there," I said.
Rizzo nodded. He seemed slightly disappointed that his joke was at
an end. I turned back to the meteorological instruments, but I
couldn't concentrate on them. Somehow I felt disappointed, too.
Subconsciously, I suppose, I had been hoping that Rizzo actually
would detect a signal from the star. Fool! I told myself. But what
could explain that bright emission line? I glanced up at the
oscilloscope again.
And suddenly the smooth steady line broke into a jagged series of
millions of peaks and nulls!
I stared at it.
Rizzo was back on his bunk again, reading one of his magazines. I
tried to call him, but the words froze in my throat. Without taking my
eyes from the flickering 'scope, I reached out and touched his arm.
He looked up.
"Holy Mother of God," Rizzo whispered.
For a long time we stared silently at the fluttering line dancing across
the oscilloscope screen, bathing our tiny dome in its weird greenish
light. It was eerily fascinating, hypnotic. The line never stood still; it
jabbered and stuttered, a series of millions of little peaks and nulls,
changing almost too fast for the eye to follow, up and down, calling to
us, speaking to us, up, down, never still, never quiet, constantly
flickering its unknown message to us.
 The line never stood still; millions of little peaks and nulls
calling to us, speaking to us, never still, never quiet, constantly
flickering its unknown message to us.

"Can it be ... people?" Rizzo wondered. His face, bathed in the

greenish light, was suddenly furrowed, withered, ancient: a mixture
of disbelief and fear.
"What else could it be?" I heard my own voice answer. "There's no
other explanation possible."
We sat mutely for God knows how long.
Finally Rizzo asked, "What do we do now?"
The question broke our entranced mood. What do we do? What
action do we take? We're thinking men, and we've been contacted
by other creatures that can think, reason, send a signal across seven
hundred lightyears of space. So don't just sit there in stupified awe.
Use your brain, prove that you're worthy of the tag sapiens.
"We decode the message," I announced. Then, as an after-thought,
"But don't ask me how."
We should have called McMurdo, or Washington. Or perhaps we
should have attempted to get a message through to the United
Nations. But we never even thought of it. This was our problem.
Perhaps it was the sheer isolation of our dome that kept us from
thinking about the rest of the world. Perhaps it was sheer luck.
"If they're using lasers," Rizzo reasoned, "they must have a
technology something like ours."
"Must have had," I corrected. "That message is seven hundred years
old, remember. They were playing with lasers when King John was
signing the Magna Charta and Genghis Khan owned most of Asia.
Lord knows what they have now."
Rizzo blanched and reached for another cigaret.
I turned back to the oscilloscope. The signal was still flashing across
its face.
"They're sending out a signal," I mused, "probably at random. Just
beaming it out into space, hoping that someone, somewhere will pick
it up. It must be in some form of code ... but a code that they feel can
be easily cracked by anyone with enough intelligence to realize that
there's a message there."
"Sort of an interstellar Morse code."
I shook my head. "Morse code depends on both sides knowing the
code. There's no key."
"Cryptographers crack codes."
"Sure. If they know what language is being used. We don't know the
language, we don't know the alphabet, the thought processes ...
nothing."
"But it's a code that can be cracked easily," Rizzo muttered.
"Yes," I agreed. "Now what the hell kind of a code can they assume
will be known to another race that they've never seen?"
Rizzo leaned back on his bunk and his face was lost in shadows.
"An interstellar code," I rambled on. "Some form of presenting
information that would be known to almost any race intelligent
enough to understand lasers...."
"Binary!" Rizzo snapped, sitting up on the bunk.
"What?"
"Binary code. To send a signal like this, they've gotta be able to write
a message in units that're only a billionth of a second long. That
takes computers. Right? Well, if they have computers, they must
figure that we have computers. Digital computers run on binary code.
Off or on ... go or no-go. It's simple. I'll bet we can slap that signal on
a tape and run it through our computer here."
"To assume that they use computers exactly like ours...."
"Maybe the computers are completely different," Rizzo said excitedly,
"but the binary code is basic to them all. I'll bet on that! And this
computer we've got here—this transistorized baby—she can handle
more information than the whole Army could feed into her. I'll bet
nothing has been developed anywhere that's better for handling
simple one-plus-one types of operations."
I shrugged. "All right. It's worth a trial."

It took Rizzo a few hours to get everything properly set up. I did
some arithmetic while he worked. If the message was in binary code,
that meant that every cycle of the signal—every flick of the dancing
line on our screen—carried a bit of information. The signal's
wavelength was 5000 Angstroms; there are a hundred million
Angstrom units to the centimeter; figuring the speed of light ... the
signal could carry, in theory at least, something like 600 trillion bits of
information per second.
I told Rizzo.
"Yeah, I know. I've been going over the same numbers in my head."
He set a few switches on the computer control board. "Now let's see
how many of the 600 trillion we can pick up." He sat down before the
board and pressed a series of buttons.
We watched, hardly breathing, as the computer's spools began
spinning and the indicator lights flashed across the control board.
Within a few minutes, the printer chugged to life.
Rizzo swivelled his chair over to the printer and held up the unrolling
sheet in a trembling hand.
Numbers. Six-digit numbers. Completely meaningless.
"Gibberish," Rizzo snapped.
It was peculiar. I felt relieved and disappointed at the same time.
"Something's screwy," Rizzo said. "Maybe I fouled up the circuits...."
"I don't think so," I answered. "After all, what did you expect out of
the computer? Shakespearean poetry?"
"No, but I expected numbers that would make some sense. One and
one, maybe. Something that means something. This stuff is
nowhere."
Our nerves must have really been wound tight, because before we
knew it we were in the middle of a nasty argument—and it was over
nothing, really. But in the middle of it:
"Hey, look," Rizzo shouted, pointing to the oscilloscope.
The message had stopped. The 'scope showed only the calm,
steady line of the star's basic two-day-long pulsation.
It suddenly occurred to us that we hadn't slept for more than 36
hours, and we were both exhausted. We forgot the senseless
argument. The message was ended. Perhaps there would be
another; perhaps not. We had the telescope, spectrometer,
photocell, oscilloscope, and computer set to record automatically.
We collapsed into our bunks. I suppose I should have had
monumental dreams. I didn't. I slept like a dead man.

When we woke up, the oscilloscope trace was still quiet.

"Y'know," Rizzo muttered, "it might just be a fluke ... I mean, maybe
the signals don't mean a damned thing. The computer is probably
translating nonsense into numbers just because it's built to print out
numbers and nothing else."
"Not likely," I said. "There are too many coincidences to be
explained. We're receiving a message, I'm certain of it. Now we've
got to crack the code."
As if to reinforce my words, the oscilloscope trace suddenly erupted
into the same flickering pattern. The message was being sent again.
We went through two weeks of it. The message would run through
for seven hours, then stop for seven. We transcribed it on tape 48
times and ran it through the computer constantly. Always the same
result—six-digit numbers; millions of them. There were six different
seven-hour-long messages, being repeated one after the other,
constantly.
We forgot the meteorological equipment. We ignored the weekly
messages from McMurdo. The rest of the world became a
meaningless fiction to us. There was nothing but the confounded,
tantalizing, infuriating, enthralling message. The National
Emergency, the bomb tests, families, duties—all transcended, all
forgotten. We ate when we thought of it and slept when we couldn't
keep our eyes open any longer. The message. What was it? What
was the key to unlock its meaning?