Dalibor Dobiáš
The forged manuscripts and Polish homecomings to national poetry
This study raises the issue of how late 1810s and early 1820s Polish literature reflects the Czech forged manuscripts, which ‘as the most prominent fraud in the style of Macpherson's Songs of Ossian’ (Donald Rayfield) substantially molded 19th and 20th century Czech culture. The generic and typological focus is on Śpiewy historyczne z muzyką i rycinami (Historical songs with music and engravings, 1816) by Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz (1758–1841), which preceded the Czech manuscripts, and the edition of Ruska prawda (Russian Truth, 1820, 1822) by the historian of Slavonic law Ignacy Benedykt Rakowiecki, which in opposition to Josef Dobrovský appreciated the pagan realia in the Zelená Hora manuscript and so had an effect on its Czech reception. In the highly developed and dynamically transforming Czech and Polish literature of the 1810s, this study identifies a number of common elements based on the case of the manuscripts and Śpiewy historyczne, but it also characterizes the differing cultural and social backgrounds behind the basic differences between the manuscripts and Śpiewy. The Czech manuscripts, created in the tradition of European Ossianism, are highlighted by the study primarily as a unique linguistic and literary achievement in the reconstruction of Czech poetic language in the latter half of the 1810s.
design by Bedřich Vémola
