Author
Kazimierz Brodziński 1791-1835

Born in Królówka (near the town of Bochnia) on the 8th of March, 1791, into an impecunious nobility family. His father was the steward of the Moszyńskis family estate. Brodziński attended schools in Lipnica Murowana, Tarnów, and Kraków. He served in the army of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1809-1813, being promoted to the rank of lieutenant. He took part in Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and got wounded in the battle of Leipzig. After the fall of the Duchy he settled in Warsaw and worked as a teacher at schools run by Piarists; he was also the secretary of the Government Management Board of the National Theatre, and censor of theatrical plays. He collaborated with “Pamiętnik Warszawski”. In 1822 he began to lecture on the history of Polish literature and stylistics at the University of Warsaw, becoming a professor of this institution. However, he lost his academic post in 1831, when the tsarist authorities closed the University in reprisal for the November Uprising, in which Brodziński was actively involved. It was during the insurgency – on the 3rd of May, 1831, to be precise – that he delivered his ‘Speech on the Nationality of the Poles’ at a session of the Society of Friends of Learning (of which he was a member, too). This speech is considered one of the most important Polish documents from the first half of the 19th century that took up the idea of the ‘nation’. In 1834 Brodziński became the editor-in-chief of “Magazyn Powszechny”. He died in Dresden on the 10th of October, 1835. He also used to write patriotic poems, often touching upon the subject of everyday life of country folk. Besides, he translated works of authors such as Schiller, Goethe, or Herder, and published treatises on literary theory in which he presented his middle-ground standpoint in relation to the dispute between the classicists and adherents of Romanticism (for instance, O klasyczności i romantyczności tudzież o duchu poezji polskiej, 1818).

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