Adam Asnyk

Adam Prot Asnyk ( born September 11, 1838 in Kalisz, Poznan Province; † August 2, 1897 in Kraków ) was a Polish poet and playwright of the era of positivism, of German origin.

Life

Asnyk came from a noble family of German origin, who immigrated in the 17th century from Silesia to Kalisch. His father (Kazimierz, † 1875 ) was an officer in the Polish army during the uprising of 1830: In the Battle of Grochow captured, he was exiled to Siberia and returned only after six years; the mother, Konstancja born Zagórowska († 1871) was from a noble family dispossessed after 1830 the circle Kalisch. Despite all the prejudices of the noble stand against commercial or artisanal employment of the father leather merchants in Kalisch was and thus acquired a considerable fortune. The son received a very careful education in a spirit of romantic nationalism.

Studies

In 1849, Adam began his training at the Municipal Secondary School in Kalisz, which now bears his name ( Adam Asnyk Lyceum ). After four years, he passed the so-called Small High School (Real exam ) from; a three-year study privately at home followed, he learned intensively foreign languages, chemistry and botany. 1856 Asnyk enrolled at the College of Agriculture in Warsaw, but was already a year later to the Medical-Surgical Academy in Warsaw. In 1859 he went to Breslau and completed two semesters of medical studies. 1861, after a prison in Warsaw's Citadel and six months stay 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 the home (see below ), he returned to Heidelberg in 1865 before increasing slightly in the next annual examinations in Political Economy, Constitutional and Administrative Law from Dr. and was phil. and Master of Arts.

Political activity

During his first student in Heidelberg formed Adam with some Polish fellow students a secret club that participated to an uprising in Congress Poland in the preparations and represented liberal and socialist ideas. The end of 1862 he went with two friends from Heidelberg to Warsaw and joined the party of " Red "; in the fall of 1863 he was elected a member of the secret National Government and was, like the secret report of the Austrian Consulate claimed to be the " anarchists who carried out an attack against the Lord Marshal Mountain" ( Grafenberg was a 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 combatants, but you do not know at what battles he participated. Beginning of 1864, he fled to Dresden and wanted to organize a government in exile there; when this failed, he went to Heidelberg and took up his studies again.

More life

After returning from Heidelberg to Asnyk settled in Galicia, first in September 1867 in Lemberg and later in 1870 in Krakow, where he was united again with his parents. In 1875 he married Zofia Kaczorowska, who came from the Province of Posen; she died after only one year, leaving a son Asnyk, Wlodzimierz. However, this became a " prodigal son ", to which the early absence of the mother and the melancholy of his father helped secure. Four years after the death of his father, after he had wasted the whole considerable fortune, he died in Paris by suicide. In Krakow Asnyk worked as an editor for various magazines, he was, among other things 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 a deputy in the Galician parliament and member of the city council in Krakow. In both, he represented about as left - liberal classify Democratic Party.

Starting at about 1880 Asnyk suffered from severe melancholy, had its origins in his frail health, the disaster in family life and also the failure of his romantic vision of a newly arisen Poland. The poet consoled himself by many trips to Italy and the Far East, but which brought only little improvement. End of April 1897 came Adam by a trip to Italy back from which he brought back the fever, and died after a few months. Adam Asnyk was buried in the crypt of Krakow's Worth Skałka Church, where mainly famous writer and painter rest. His hometown Kalisch thought of him with a mounted on his birth home plaque (1957) and a monument (1970).

Lyrical works

Today, almost completely forgotten ( you meet some of his poems only in school anthologies ), Adam Asnyk was in the last decades of the 19th century as the greatest Polish poets of his time. His works have found an enthusiastic reception among his contemporaries. Above all, he was a master of the form: Henryk Sienkiewicz said about his poems that they " are reminiscent of the work Benvenuto Cellini ". His language was clear and precise and at the same time very elegant. Asnyk debuted as an imitator of romance in the wake of Heinrich Heine and Alfred de Musset; according to the national defeat in 1863 he turned to the positivism, without, however, completely committed to the positivist postulates - he took a middle position between the two literary directions. In the last phase of his life he created thoughts poetry, in which he approached the Indian philosophy, where at the same time show the influence of Schelling, Friedrich Rückert and Arthur Schopenhauer. Many of his poems have been translated (mainly in German ) and set to music. He also wrote short stories and dramas, but they are completely forgotten.

Asnyks philosophy is loud Czeslaw Milosz " strongly influenced by scientific evolutionism of the 19th century by the German philosophy of idealism and perhaps of Słowacki philosophical ideas: Although exercise according to unchangeable laws of the whole universe is composed of atoms as its own, there is one on the matter beyond spiritual power that leads to the completion of all phenomena, thereby fulfilling the blind dance of the elements with meaning. "

Works

• Poezje, ( debut ), Lviv 1869
• Poezje ( four volumes ), Krakow - Lviv 1872-1894
• Pisma zebrane ( Collected Works ), 1-2, ed: H. Schipper, Warsaw 1938-1939
• German translation: Selected Poems, Vienna 1887