EUZEBIUSZ SŁOWACKI: AN INTELLECTUAL PORTRAIT AT THE CROSSROADS OF EPOCHS

Abstract

The figure of Euzebiusz Słowacki – father of the Polish literary classic Juliusz Słowacki, a teacher, writer, translator, and theorist of literature – remains ambiguous and not yet fully established in scholarly discourse. Nevertheless, his creative legacy, although not extensive in volume, is profound and multifaceted. In each of his roles, Euzebiusz Słowacki demonstrates both a close alignment with his own era and a forward-looking cultural perspective. As a translator, he focused primarily on classical antiquity, whose examples set the aesthetic benchmark to which both the artist and the reader should aspire. In his original works written in Polish, Euzebiusz Słowacki, without intending to surpass the existing aesthetic level of Polish literature, sought to construct a genuinely historical Polish cultural context – one that could introduce national literature into the ranks of European literary traditions. The central idea of his aesthetic theory lies in the need to develop clear criteria for the not yet widely accepted notion of taste, shaped through the assimilation of the finest models of art. It should be remembered that, lacking formal philological and pedagogical training, Słowacki devoted a significant portion of his intellectual efforts to independently mastering the core principles of the scholarly and pedagogical disciplines he taught in Kremenets and Vilnius: poetics and rhetoric. In his pedagogical reflections, he proceeded from strictly pragmatic considerations, encouraging his students to engage consciously with the process of reading literary texts. Taking into account that Euzebiusz Słowacki historically belongs to the phenomenon of «Polish Literature of Ukraine», an essential prerequisite for the effective reception of his intellectual legacy is the qualified translation of his theoretical writings and didactic essays into Ukrainian, enabling their integration into the broader context of European culture.