Adam Asnyk

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Adam Asnyk

Adam Prot Asnyk (born September 11, 1838 in Kalisch , Russian Poland , † August 2, 1897 in Cracow ) was a Polish poet and playwright of the era of positivism .

Jacek Malczewski : Adam Asnyk and Muse, 1895–1897

Life

Asnyk came from a noble family of German origin who immigrated to Kalisch from Silesia in the 17th century . His father Kasimir (Kazimierz, † around 1875) was an officer in the Polish army during the uprising of 1830 : captured in the Battle of Grochow , he was exiled to Siberia and only returned after six years; the mother, Konstancja b. Zagórowska († 1871) came from a noble family from the Kalisch district who had been deposed after 1830 . Despite all the prejudices of the noble class against commercial or manual employment, the father became a leather merchant in Kalisch and thereby acquired a significant fortune. The son received a very careful upbringing in the spirit of romantic nationalism .

Studies

In 1849 Adam began his training at the municipal secondary school in Kalisch, which today bears his name (Adam Asnyk Lyceum ). After four years he passed the so-called Small Abitur (real exam ); A three-year private study at home followed, he learned foreign languages, chemistry and botany intensively . In 1856 Asnyk enrolled at the University of Agriculture in Warsaw , but a year later he went to the Medical-Surgical Academy in Warsaw. In 1859 he went to Breslau and completed two semesters of medical studies there. In 1861, after imprisonment in the Warsaw Citadel and six months in Paris , he enrolled in Heidelberg , where he attended lectures in political economy , philosophy , international law and German and Roman legal history . After three years of political activity in his home country (see below), he returned to Heidelberg in 1865, passed exams in political economy , constitutional law and administrative law the next year and became a Dr. phil. and Magister Artium .

Political activity

Even during his first studies in Heidelberg, Adam formed a secret association with some Polish fellow students, which participated in the preparations for an uprising in Congress Poland and represented liberal and socialist ideas. At the end of 1862 he went to Warsaw with two friends from Heidelberg and joined the party of the "Reds"; In the autumn of 1863 he became a member of the secret national government and, as the secret report of the Austrian consulate claimed, was one of the "anarchists who carried out an assassination attempt against field marshal Berg" (Count Berg was the Russian governor general in Warsaw). After the dissolution of the "red" government by the dictator of the uprising Romuald Traugutt , Asnyk joined the ranks of the fighting, but it is not known in which battles he took part. At the beginning of 1864 he fled to Dresden and wanted to organize a government in exile there; when this failed, he went to Heidelberg and resumed his studies.

Further life

Asnyk monument in Kalisch, in the background on the left his school

After returning from Heidelberg, Asnyk settled in Galicia , first in September 1867 in Lemberg and later from 1870 in Krakow , where he reunited with his parents. In 1875 he married Zofia Kaczorowska, who came from the province of Posen ; she died after only a year and left Asnyk a son, Wlodzimierz. However, he developed into a "prodigal son", to which the early absence of the mother and the melancholy of the father certainly contributed. Four years after his father's death, after having wasted all of his considerable fortune, he died of suicide in Paris. Asnyk worked as an editor for various magazines in Cracow. a. From 1889 responsible editor of the liberal newspaper " Nowa Reforma " ( "New Reform "), in which he fought both the conservatives and the socialists. From 1889 he was also a member of the Galician state parliament and a member of the city ​​council in Krakow. In both he represented the Democratic Party, which can be roughly classified as a left-liberal .

As early as 1880, Asnyk suffered from severe melancholy , the origin of which lay in his poor health, the unhappiness in family life and the failure of his romantic vision of a new Poland. The poet consoled himself through many trips to Italy and the Far East, which, however, brought little improvement. At the end of April 1897 Adam came back from a trip to Italy from which he brought typhus with him, and died a few months later . Adam Asnyk was buried in the crypt of the Skałka Church in Cracow , where famous authors and painters rest. His hometown Kalisch commemorated him with a plaque on his birthplace (1957) and a memorial (1970).

Lyric work

Almost completely forgotten today (you only come across some of his poems in school anthologies), Adam Asnyk was considered the most important Polish poet of his time in the last decades of the 19th century. His works found an enthusiastic reception among contemporaries. Above all, he was a master of form: Henryk Sienkiewicz said of his poems that they "are reminiscent of the work of Benvenuto Cellini ". His language, too, was clear and precise and at the same time very elegant. Asnyk made his debut as an epigone of Romanticism in the succession of Heinrich Heine and Alfred de Musset ; after the national defeat of 1863 he turned to positivism , but without fully embracing the positivist postulates - he took a middle position between the two literary directions. In the last phase of his life he wrote thought poetry , in which he approached Indian philosophy, but where influences from Schelling , Friedrich Rückert and Arthur Schopenhauer can be seen at the same time . Many of his poems have been translated (especially into German) and set to music. He also wrote short stories and dramas, but they are completely forgotten.

Asnyk's philosophy , according to Czesław Miłosz, "is strongly influenced by the scientific evolutionism of the 19th century, by the German philosophy of idealism and perhaps by Słowacki's philosophical ideas: although movement according to unchangeable laws is inherent in the entire universe composed of atoms, there is one about that Spiritual power going beyond matter, which leads all phenomena to perfection and thereby fills the blind dance of the elements with meaning ".

Works

  • Poezje , (debut), Lemberg 1869
  • Poezje (four volumes), Krakau – Lemberg 1872–1894
  • Pisma zebrane (Collected Works), 1–2, Ed .: H. Schipper, Warsaw 1938–1939
  • German translation: Selected poems , Vienna 1887

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Author: Adam Asnyk  - Sources and full texts (Polish)
Commons : Adam Asnyk  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Asnyk, Adam
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Asnyk, Adam Prot (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish poet and playwright of positivism
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1838
PLACE OF BIRTH Kalisch
DATE OF DEATH August 2, 1897
Place of death Krakow