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“So that Truth and Goodness and Beauty may be made”. Norwid’s friendship in his “penultimate years” (Mieczysław Geniusz)
Abstract
As a resident of St. Casimir’s House, Norwid was friends with the young Polish engineer Mieczysław Geniusz, who travelled to Egypt in the 1870s and brought from there small ancient “souvenirs” and information for the poet that influenced the late revisions of the drama Kleopatra i Cezar [Cleopatra and Caesar]. Geniusz’s book collection, bequeathed to the Polish libraries in his will, as well as the surviving correspondence by his friends, give rise to some hypotheses about their common readings and discussions (on Plato, St. Paul, the Church Fathers, Swedenborg, the Quran, the Arabic language). The echo of their meetings and “oriental” conversations resounds in the poem [Do Mieczysława Geniusza] [To Mieczysław Geniusz], which contains elements of Arabic lexis and paremiology.
Keywords:
Mieczysław Geniusz, Norwid’s late works, St. Casimir’s House, Orient, Romanticism, 19th-century collecting, Arabic inspirationsDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
