Initiation into Literature Part 10

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES.--Though somewhat less brilliant than the preceding, the period of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is not unfavourable to Poland. Then may be enumerated the satirical Opalinski, the lyrical Kochanowski, the dramatist Bogulawski, manager of the theatre at Warsaw, who not only translated plays from the French, English, and Spanish, but himself wrote several comedies, of which _The Lover, Author, and Servant_ has remained the most celebrated. Rzewuski was a dramatic author with such national plays as _Wladislas at Varna_ and _Zolkewishi_, and comedies as _The Vexations_ and _The Capricious_, and he also was historian, orator, literary critic, and theorist.

Potocki was a literary and theoretical critic and founder of a sort of Polish academy (society for the perfection of the tongue and of style).

Prince Czartoryski showed himself an excellent moralist in his _Letters to Doswiadryski_. Niemcewicz extended his great literary talent into a ma.s.s of diversified efforts. He wrote odes held in esteem, tragedies, comedies, fables, and tales, historical novels, and he translated the poems of Pope and the _Athalie_ of Racine.

LITERARY RENAISSANCE.--Losing her national independence, Poland experienced a veritable literary renaissance, which offered but slender compensation. She applied herself to explore her origins, to regain the ancient spirit, and to live nationally in her literature. Hence her great works of patriotic erudition. Czacki with his _Laws of Poland and of Lithuania_, Kollontay with his _Essay on the Heredity of the Throne of Poland_, and his _Letters of an Anonymous to Stanislas Malachowski_, etc., Bentkowski with his _History of Polish Literature_ and his _Introduction to General Literature_, etc. Thence came the revival of imaginative literature, Felinski, on the one hand translator of Crebillon, Delille and Alfieri on the other, he was the personally distinguished author of the drama _Barbe Radzivill_; Bernatowicz, author of highly remarkable historical novels, among which _Poata_ gives a picture of the triumph of Christianity in Lithuania in the fourteenth century; Karpinski, dramatist, author of _Judith_, a tragedy; _Alcestis_, an opera; _Cens_, a comedy, etc.; Mickiewicz, scholar, poet, and novelist, who, exiled from his own land, was professor of literature at Lausanne, then in Paris, at the College of France, extremely popular in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, the friend of Goethe, Lamennais, Cousin, Michelet, and of all the French youth. He was the author of fine poems, of a great historical novel, _Conrade Vattenrod_, of _The People and the Polish Pilgrims_, of a _Lesson on the Slav States_.

MODERN EPOCH.--At the time of writing, Poland continues to be a literary nation well worthy of attention. She presents an example to the races which incur the risk of perishing as nations because of their political incapacity; by preserving their tongue and by sanctifying it with a worthy literature they guard their country and, like the Greeks and Italians, hope to reconquer it some day through the sudden turns of fortune shown in history.