Norwid, Heine, Gautier and the beginnings of modernism

Abstract

Norwid’s affiliations with symbolism and modernism that were obvious to Juliusz Gomulicki have been lately questioned. Instead of exposing the resemblances between his poetry and prose and the literary innovations of his French, early modernist contemporaries, Polish Norwid-specialists have (with a few exceptions) focused on his roots in the native Polish tradition. This paper compares funerary motives in Norwid’s oeuvre (Black Flowers, Chopin’s agony and death) with the treatment of similar motives in the oeuvre of Théophile Gautier (a highly poetical description of Heinrich Heine’s „Matratzengruft”). Not surprisingly, Norwid’s description makes it possible to establish a link with sacred history, while Gautier – who was an excellent poetical craftsman – uses religious images and motives for “ornamental” purposes. Norwid’s “metaphysical” approach to death is reminiscent of Charles Baudelaire’s practice, who juxtaposed worn-out religious imagery with non-religious objects and situations in order to represent a metaphysical worldview à rebours in which God is not present but absent. As a Christian poet, Norwid was, in a certain sense, more anachronistic than Baudelaire, but on the other hand, his literary juxtapositions of sacred and profane motives are even more daring than the French poet’s representations of this conflict between tradition and modernity