Ryszard Berwiński’s Studia o literaturze ludowej and Historiographical Concepts of the Early Slavic World in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The aim of the article is to show how, in his Studia o literaturze ludowej (Studies on folk
literature), Ryszard Berwiński evaluated the nineteenth-century historiographical concepts of
the Slavic world and ancestry. The first part of the article discusses Berwiński’s approach to
the general theory of “folk element/energy”, whose influence manifested itself for example
in discussions of the history of literature as divided into Slavic-Polish and Latin-Polish. The
second part briefly introduces the nineteenth-century theories of the origin of the Polish
nation and their assessment in contemporary research. The third part of the article presents
how Ryszard Berwiński commented on those concepts, on the historiography of his time,
and on the ideas about the early Slavic world.