Wydawnictwo Sic! Warszawa 2004 145 x 210 579 pages hardcover ISBN 83-88807-58-7 Translation rights: Sic!
Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz
Słowacki: The Encyclopaedia
About the author
Rymkiewicz is a bit like Indiana Jones. By day he is a quiet professor at the highly respectable Institute for Literary Research and a subtle elegiac poet. Only now and then does he reveal himself to be a tireless, fearless hunter after lost treasures from the past. This time, his investigation centres on the life and work of Juliusz Słowacki, to whom he dedicated another book several years ago, entitled Juliusz Słowacki asks the time. As this book is about Słowacki, we inevitably find ourselves at the very heart of issues concerning Romanticism and symbolism, so there are mists, tears and souls, but there is also an unpleasant mother, some gambling on the stock market, and the question of whether, after the exhumation of the bard’s remains, not only his skull, but also his sock was laid to rest at the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow. Naturally, Rymkiewicz is loyal to his hero and renders the romantic unto the Romantic, but at the same time he doesn’t forget or ignore common sense. And in this book, as in life, everything is blended together in an odd way. Sublimity appears alongside mundanity, and the idealised image of the sweetheart clashes with the indignity of having to rent cheap guest rooms to receive her. This combination of solemnity and a knowing wink makes Rymkiewicz’s new book compulsive reading. His care and consideration are admirable, though they never degenerate into undue self-confidence. I am also very taken by his sensitivity towards the characters he describes. Rymkiewicz’s painstaking work involves unearthing tiny scraps of information and using them to reconstruct a past long gone, supported by knowledge of the era and guesswork relying on psychological probability, detective-style deduction and a way of putting together facts that at first sight look remote or seem to have nothing in common with each other. Another feature that adds to the continuous tension you feel while reading is the use of the short section/mini-chapter/dictionary entries of which the book is comprised. They are concise enough to hold readers' attention in a constant state of alert, and prompt them to construct their own totalities as they wish. There’s no denying that Słowacki: The Encyclopaedia is a captivating work full of academic precision, intellectual inspiration and excellent wit.
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