"How wonderful life was on the Border!" – Intertextual Relations between Chart watażki and Mohort

Abstract

The article explores the complex relations between Mieczysław Romanowski's poetry and Wincenty Pol's most outstanding work. This allows for a new, more favorable look at the author's writings and it shows how diverse the sources of his inspiration could be.

Chart watażki was created because the poet was greatly influenced by the reading of Mohort. However, the piece is not a passive imitation. Romanowski drew from Pol’s poem what had already previously stimulated the imagination of national artists: the myth of the Borderlands, which was a reminder of the times when Poland was magnificent and mighty and a return to the idealized noble past, which resulted in the popularity of prose and poetry tale in the nineteenth century. In Chart watażki Romanowski is closer to the established model of the tale than Pol, who – by putting  in his work heroization – created a knight rhapsody. By using the tools of postcolonial methodology we can see that the image of the Borderlands, that we can find in his poems, is not the result of only Mohort's inspiration, but rather a part of the nineteenth century discourse.