Alicja Bańczyk

This article analyses the role of the past references in the Book of the Marvels of the World written in the 13th century by Marco Polo, a Venetian explorer and merchant who travelled through Asia and had his memories written down by Rustichiello da Pisa. At the beginning, the characteristics of the text and its complexity are presented. In the following section, the role of descriptions relating to the future and to the present is shown. Then, a number of levels are distinguished through which references to the past are situated in the narrative. One level is through a description of the circumstances in which the text was created. Another level is through a report from the Polo family’s first trip to the East. The next level is the story of Marco’s journey with his father and uncle. Finally, there is also a time level where all the references to the history of the lands visited by the author are situated. Marco Polo attempts to show interesting stories related to the lands he has visited, using intertextual references to myths and legends familiar to Europeans of his time. Some stories are intended to show how the rule of Kublai Khan changed the image of Asia and to highlight the development of civilization related to the expansion of the Mongol empire.

This article attempts to answer the questions concerning ways of resolving conflicts between two types of obligations: those owed to one’s family and those resulting from feudal relations. An analysis of literary portrayals such a conflict of obligation and its solutions is carried out here on the basis of the heroic epic (chanson de geste) Renaut de Montauban, with Aymon, the father of rebellious brothers opposing Charles the Great as a protagonist who has to make a choice between his loyalty to the monarch and taking the side of his own children. The article compared two versions of the story: the one from the 13th-century manuscript Douce 121 and its 15th-century prose adaptation, included in the manuscript Sloane 960. The two versions are juxtaposed in order to find out if Aymon’s attitude to his obligations is depicted differently depending on the time of creating the text. First, an analysis is presented of the oath (forjurement) made by Aymon before the monarch, in which he accepts the obligation not to help his children, and to fight against them. Then, on the basis of selected fragments of both versions, the protagonist’s understanding of material support and the duty to fight against his own children is discussed. The comparative analyses of the two versions indicate that much as Aymon does not exclude the possibility of offering material support to his sons, e.g. by supplying them with food or money, he never considers the possibility of providing a military support. On the contrary, he is actively engaged in a fight against them, which may be a consequence of the oath. According to the law, breaking the oath by offering military support was penalized by death, whereas material support could result in a less grievous punishment. It is also demonstrated that the duties with respect to one’s family are treated much more seriously in the later version of the epic, with a clear suggestion that they should outweigh the obligations to the feudal lord.

Fitting into the current law and literature movement, the article focuses on the literary depiction of changes within divorce proceedings in nineteenth-century France based on Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami. Written in 1885, the book depicts, in a highly realistic manner, fault-based divorce proceedings at the time of its creation. In the introduction, I briefly touch upon the evolution of the French divorce proceedings throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its final outcome: the legalisation of a dissolution of marriage in 1884. The article attempts to answer the question how that revolutionary change of the divorce law influenced the novel’s content and how Guy de Maupassant depicted the dissolution of marriage in his work, and to verify if this depiction reflects legal reality.

When analysing Russian literature and social thought of the nineteenth century, it can be easily observed that the works can manifest one of two tendencies prevalent in those times: Occidental or Slavophil one. Russian Catholics have been so far recognised as the representatives of the former because of their positive attitude towards Western Europe and its religion.

The focus of this article is on the four immigrants permanently living in France, members of the Jesuit Order – Ivan Gagarin, Ivan Martynov, Yevgeniy Balabin and Paweł Pierling. Their perception of Slavic matters, the Slavs and their religious problems allows them to locate their ideas in relation to the views of Slavophiles and Occidentalists. Russian Catholics do not deny the influence of other Slavic cultures and broadly understood Orthodoxy on Russia, or the cultural heritage of Western Europe – the Old Russian past is a reason for pride and belief in the significant importance of Russia’s national culture. Contrary to the Slavophiles, they propose that Russia should become Catholic power to fulfil a great civilisational mission towards the West. The article discusses Russian Catholicism as the third trend in the Russian culture of the analysed period, which is closely related to the aforementioned tendencies but it does not fully overlap with any of them.