Monika Coghen

The significance of Byron’s presence in Polish culture and its diverse aspects have been widely noted. Not much has been said, however, on the representation of Byronism as a disease. The rumours of Byron’s madness were spread by Annabella, but the very cult of Byron as a celebrity and in particular the attempts of many men who tried to model their life on that of Byron could have been seen as a mental disorder. A fictional study of Byronism as a disease was offered in Zygmunt Kaczkowski’s novel Bajronista (The Byronist, 1855–1856; 1857), which used as its epigraph the memorable lines from Słowacki’s poem Beniowski, in which the poet declares himself to be a “Byronist”. The aim of this paper is to discuss the representation of Byronism in Kaczkowski’s novel in the context of the Polish reception of Byron. Kaczkowski attempts to present Byronism as a destructive social and cultural phenomenon; hence he uses the image of a disease, which eventually results in actual illness and death. Kaczkowski’s portrayal of Byronic madness is expressive, on the one hand, of the critical tradition represented by Friedrich Schlegel’s charges of atheism against Byron and by Kazimierz Brodziński’s warnings against dangers of following models of English and German poetry, and on the other hand, of the novelist’s disillusionment with the ideology of Polish Romanticism.
 

Lord Byron and the Metamorphoses of Polidori’s Vampyres

The aim of this article is to investigate the links between vampire stories and plays and Lord Byron in the context of his early nineteenth-century reception in Europe, and particularly in Poland. Byron is often regarded as one of the main originators of vampire stories in modern European culture and occasionally even as a model for vampiric characters. This image of Byron was mainly constructed on the basis of a passage in The Giaour and John Polidori’s tale The Vampyre, which had first been erroneously attributed to Byron. Owing to Byron’s literary fame as the greatest living British poet as well as to his scandalous reputation, The Vampyre gained great popularity both in Britain and on the Continent, which resulted in numerous theatrical adaptations, especially in France and in Germany. In Poland the French melodrama Upiór (Le Vampire) by Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche and Achille de Jouffroy was a great stage success and was published in a book form.
Polidori’s tale allegedly originated in Byron’s idea, the record of which appears in the fragment called “Augustus Darvell”. Echoing the techniques Byron used to suggest to his readers that he himself might be identified with the protagonists of his poetic tales, Polidori similarly invites the reader to identify his eponymous vampire Lord Ruthven with Lord Byron. In Byron’s fragment one can trace only a hint of vampirism; in Polidori’s story it becomes a metaphor not only of sexual profligacy but also of “byromania”, the cult of Byron among his female readers. In popular melodrama the vampire character is conflated with Don Giovanni from Mozart’s opera, possibly because of Byron’s publication of the first two cantos of Don Juan.

Polish Readings of Byron’s Epitaph on Boatswain

The Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog, which Byron had engraved on the memorial to his dog Boatswain in the grounds of Newstead Abbey, has been one of the most often reprinted and translated poems by Byron. In her book Kindred Brutes Christine Kenyon--Jones has thoroughly examined the genealogy of the poem and pointed to its potential for manifold interpretations and to its role in establishing the image of Byron as ‘a misanthropic dog-lover’. The Polish reception of the poem confirms both its ideological and political potential and its role in the creation of one of the stereotypical images of Byron.
This paper examines Polish translations of Byron’s Inscription, pointing to the role of the poet’s lives, particularly L. Belloc’s French biography, in the formation of the myth of the Byron and in the transmission of the knowledge of his works. It also traces literary allusions to the poem in the works of Polish writers. In the Russian-controlled Congress Kingdom of Poland the banning of the poem on the grounds of a theological error marked one of the first noted interventions of preventive censorship in 1825. Nonetheless, the Polish translations were published first in the Austrian-controlled Lviv in 1825, and then in the Russian-controlled Vilnius in 1834, both exploring the poem’s political potential. On the other hand, in his drama Fantazy Juliusz Słowacki used ironic references to the poem to criticize the Byronic stance.
 

Byron claimed that Manfred had not been intended for the stage, but his dramatic poem was occasionally produced in the nineteenth-century theatre. In 1848 Robert Schumann adapted the poem for stage performance, composing the Overture and incidental music. Schumann’s version of Manfred was staged in Warsaw Teatr Wielki, with Józef Kotarbiński, a well-known actor, theatre manager and critic as the protagonist. The production was followed by a heated debate in the press. The central controversy focused on whether Byron’s “metaphysical drama” was suitable for the stage and relevant for the late nineteenth-century Polish audience. The aim of this paper is to examine central issues in this debate by scrutinizing the press reviews of the Warsaw production. As the reviews are by their very nature subjective, their examination reveals much more about their authors’ literary and theatrical preferences than about the performance itself, and provides an insight in the early stages of the development of the so-called Young Poland movement (Młoda Polska), with its emphasis on individualism and subjectivity, interest in metaphysics, and prevalence of lyricism. The 1892 Manfred in Warsaw may be seen as an attempt at introducing great Romantic poetry in the theatre, paving the way for the theatre productions of Polish Romantic drama, which Kotarbiński was to stage as the manager of Teatr Miejski in Kraków. The article also contributes to the history of Byron’s reception in Poland.

One of the most memorable metaphors depicting Byron’s poetic process comes from his 1813 letter to Annabella Millbanke, where he refers to poetry as ‘the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake’. As Susan Wolfson has noted (Romantic Interactions 278–280), volcanic imagery also frequently appeared in the early nineteenth-century writings on Byron even before Byron’s self-reflexive image became generally known, and this can be linked to the recurrence of volcanic tropes in Byron’s poetry. A closer examination of the metaphorical discourse of the period, however, reveals that Byron, his admirers and his critics drew on the stockpile of images popular at the time. This article proposes to examine some of metamorphoses of this imagery from its appearance in Byron’s writings to the image of Byron’s poetry not as “the lava of the imagination” but the lava of the turbulent turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Mickiewicz’s essay on Byron and Goethe.