Św. Stanisław ze Szczepanowa w kulturze umysłowo-literackiej dawnej Polski

Abstract

The essay is an extended version of the paper read on May 29, 1978, at the Academic Session on St. Stanislaus, held in the Archdiocesan Curia of Cracow, where it was presented as a parallel study to Dr. D. Turkowska’s (see below p. 499). The author has therefore concentrated chiefly on the literature, both poetry and prose, in the Polish language, from the late thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century, none the less stressing the close link with, and constantly finding it necessary – for the sake of literary comparison – to refer to the collateral Latin (though, of course, equally “Polish”) writings, especially the prose lying outside the scope of his colleague’s paper, whilst the limits of his own subject have left further/ non-literary aspects of the historical sources to be treated by the appropriate specialists. After a brief account of the studies conducted hitherto on the subject and of the points still requiring attention, the author begins with the linguistic side of the matter, noting the rapid rise to a nation-wide popularity of the name “Stanisław”, associated as early as the beginning of the 13th century (i.e. before the canonisation in Assissi in 1253) with the widespread cult of the Saint and giving rise to a whole range of onomastic variants, with almost 50 derivatives from the abbreviated form “Stach” alone, a further 30 from the diminutive “Staszek”, and some 40 to 60 from the basic “Stanisław” (the ambiguity here being caused by the possibility of some originating from the similar, and now obsolete name, “Stanimir”). This in turn produced a whole series of Polish surnames, about 70 of which (and doubtless many more could still be found) were referred to in the lecture, with even an imposing list of derivatives assimilated by other languages, such as the German “Stenzel”, “Stanke”, “Staesche”, etc. But the really astounding linguistic success of the name was in its being the source of numerous place-names, amounting to some 250 positions as recorded in the available topographical data for the pre-partition Polish territory. And to close the linguistic section, the author turns to a well-known study of Christian names used in Poland, to give a chronological and statistical review of the history of the name “Stanisław”, showing that at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries it was already the fourth most popular masculine name in the country (after “Mikołaj”, “Jan”, and “Piotr”); by the 16th it had established itself as the second or third in order of popularity; remaining throughout the l7th and 18th centuries among the top four or so most common names; until – by 1921 – the official list of officers serving in the Polish forces showed that “Stanisław” had gained a clear lead over the other Christian names, with its total of 763 instances in the officers’ list (7.7% of this particular population), and well ahead of ’’Jan”, “Jozef”, “Władysław”, “Kazimierz”, “Tadeusz”, etc. The figure of St. Stanislaus also made a tremendous impact on Polish folklore, both in its peasant branch, as in the now extinct folklore of the gentry, with the numerous legends and stories (especially in the Cracovian and Little Poland regions) about the Saint, leaving their imprint also in a wealth of Polish proverbs on Stanislaus. As regards the literary “career” of the St. Stanislaus tradition – with its early beginnings in the mediaeval Latin chronicles of Gallus Anonymus and Master Vincentius; in both the hagiographies (the “Vita Minor” before, and the “Vita Maior” after the canonisation) as well as in other Church documents, and the hymns (both in the liturgical sequences, dating from the middle of the 13th century, as in the related breviary hymns, such as the famous, late 13th century “Gaude, Mater Polonia”) – there are a few historical facts at its very outset which are of special importance. The first concerns the dawn of Polish poetry and the ancient “patrium carmen”, the “Bogurodzica”, to which was added, at the earliest by the turn of the 14th and 15th century, a stanza addressed to St. Stanislaus. Of particular moral significance and patriotic prestige, the St. Stanislaus invocation later gave rise to a whole series of variations, often adapted to meet the particular needs of the time (providing, for example, a reminder of the catastrophic battle of Varna against the Turks in 1444, or, on another occasion, of a famine). At the same time it shared a rich poetic tradition with the then highly popular church hymns about the Saint, such as the beautiful, 23-stanza hymn (written in the 1450’s) relating the legend about the Bishop, which has survived down to our times. So popular in fact, that new hymns about the Saint were constantly being added to the old repertoire for a number of centuries to come. The second point is that, as regards the mediaeval prose, there must certainly have been very many sermons about St. Stanislaus (now unfortunately lost) from the second half of the 13th century onwards, especially in Cracow where the first Polish Dominican, St. Jacek Odrowąż (d. 1257) is said to have preached about the Saint at his tomb in the Cathedral on Wawel Hill. It may be inferred from the scraps of the famous calendar of sermons for saints’ and holy days, “Kazania świętokrzyskie” (date 13th century), salvaged by Bruckner, that the collection almost certainly contained a vernacular sermon about St. Stanislaus for his feast-day in May. The existing 14th and 15th century sermons about the Saint are basically Latin, but they were undoubtedly preached in Polish. The earliest is the homily by the Silesian preacher, Peregrinus Polonus, from the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, translated in the 15th into Czech. Another St. Stanislaus sermon is to be found in the late 14th century “Kazania gnieźnieńskie” manuscript, where the text itself is in Latin, but with interlinear glosses in Polish. Leaving aside the two already mentioned, 13th century lives of the Saint, and the Polish manuscript variations of Jacobus de Voragine’s “Legenda Aurea” which acquired locally two early 14th century Latin stories about the Saint (for his feast-day, May 8, and his translation, September 27), one is faced, at the beginning of the Polish Renaissance in the latter half of the 15th century, with a marked intensification of both the historical and the literary and artistic approach to the image of the Saint. An intensification attributable to the penmanship first of the historian, Jan Długosz (d. 1480), and secondly of the Italian expatriate, Filippo Buonaccorsi “Callimachus” (d. 1496), two great literary personalities symbolizing, as it were, their times – of transition from Middle Ages to Renaissance, in which the historian’s art in the work of the traditional but highly reliable and thorough Długosz gave us the basic historical facts on the Saint’s life (“Vita Beatissimi Stanislai Episcopi Cracoviensis”) with a digest in “Annales seu Cronicae Incliti Regni Poloniae”, whilst the verse of the humanist Buonaccorsi, “Carmen Sapphicum in Vitam Gloriosissimi Martyris Sancti Stanislai [...] Polonorum Gentis Patroni”, ushered the figure of the Polish Saint into the great pantheon of Renaissance panegyrical poetry. And the writings of both, with their several re-prints, exerted a deep and long-lasting influence on later texts. Callimachus marks the beginning of the really great Latin poetry in the Polish Renaissance, with works on St. Stanislaus by such outstanding poets as Paulus Crosnensis, the Pope’s laureate Clemens Janicius, Petrus Roysius, Nicolaus Sęp-Szarzyński, and Simon Szymonowie “Simonides” following his pattern. And the Dlugossian “Vita Beatissimi Stanislai” was to re-appear frequently, right down to the 18th and even 19th century, in several editions, both in the original Latin, as well as in translations: the Polish of M. Wilkowiecki, but also in a German version and even in an Italian abridgement. The figure of the Saint also attracted the prose branches of Polish 16th century literature, especially the superbly rhetorical homilies, postils, and collections of sermons (by J. Wujek, P. Skarga, and others); the popular histories (of M. Miechowita, M. Bielski, M. Kromer, etc.); the hagiographies (notably Skarga’s “Żywoty Świętych”); occasionally adding historical spice to the rich and varied political writings of such prominent authors as A. Frycz Modrzewski and S. Orzechowski; and cropping up now and again even in such apparently remote, erudite treatises, as Goslioki’s “De Optimo Senatore” (with its English translations), mentioned also as a historical personality in Bodin’s “Les six livres de la Republique”. It is noteworthy that the Polish Reformation – reluctant though it was in general to the cult of the saints – behaved with the utmost respect towards the national Patron, as its renowned sympathisers, the above-mentioned Frycz and Bielski, reflected in their works, and as even the later Protestant hymnals, including one used by the Poloni Fratres, showed. Alongside the hymns, old and new, still in common use in the late 16th and the 17th centuries, a series of dramatised versions of the Saint’s life now appeared and quickly gained popularity. These included the traditionally-inspired students’ productions, similar to the old mysteries, such as those played by the Cracovian undergraduates or the school production of “Dyjalog o św. Stanisławie” put on by Chełmno College in Pomerania. But the really massive dramatic output of the time on the subject of the Saint came from the Polish Jesuit colleges where we know that in the period from 1574 to about 1730 well over a dozen such “tragical acts”, plays, and spectacles were staged. There were a further dozen or so Jesuit productions on St. Stanislaus abroad, at such places as Augsburg, Cologne, Tournai, Malines, and Luxemburg, besides the “tragoedia sacra” by Nicolaus Vernulaeus (Louvain, 1618), unconnected with the Jesuits but having Kromer’s historical account as its source. And again in the basically spiritual culture of the Baroque Sarmatianism spanning the whole of the 17th century, it was the figure of St. Stanislaus which proved a favourite theme in the luxuriant prose of the sermons – both in the Polish as in the Latin, “exported” versions (delivered abroad by eminent preachers in the Polish churches in Rome, Padua, and elsewhere) – echoing the full rhetorical gamut of the literature of the age. The style of preaching was Baroque and at the same time – patriotic: its note of patriotism undergoing an unmistakable intensification as the long wars with the heterodox (Turk, Swede, Muscovite) dragged on throughout the century, to play a fundamental role of moral encouragement later on in the difficult times at the demise of the Polish Commonwealth in the 18th century. In the 18th century – the age in which the majority of the Polish reformers’ attempts to modernize and save the country politically (consistently thwarted by the eventual partitioners, Prussia, Russia, and Austria) were always linked with the national spiritual heritage, in which the cult of St. Stanislaus was one of the fundamental elements. The subject of St. Stanislaus was still as popular as ever in the church pulpits, keeping abreast of the latest intellectual trends, and we find the typical imprints of the Enlightenment in the sermons on the Saint produced in this period, especially in the final quarter-century of independence, by such writers as H. Kołłątaj, J. P. Woronicz, J. N. Kossakowski, A. Malinowski, and others, under the auspices of King Stanislaus Augustus – and with the statesmen responsible for the 1791 Constitution, the participants of the Four-Year Seym, and finally all fighting in the 1794 Insurrection under Kosciuszko’s leadership as their congregation. Some time before there had been the fifth centenary jubilee of the canonisation (1753/4), celebrated in Poland (mainly, of course, in Cracow) and, thanks to the efforts of Andrzej Stanisław Załuski, Bishop of Cracow, also in Italy. Another sign of the continued flourishing of the cult in the enlightened century was the merit award, the Order of St. Stanislaus, established by the King in 1765, the holders of which pledged to subsidise a Warsaw hospital run on public charity. Finally, the revival, at the very end of the age, of interest in the Saint as a subject for artistic treatment (eg. in the opera by Sierakowski, about 1780) was to find its continuation in the 19th century Late Classical and Romantic poetry and drama.