Jacek Idzi Przybylski and the “Young” Poets in Franciszek Morawski’s “Nowy Parnas”

Abstract

The aim of the article is to explain the fact that Jacek Idzi Przybylski (1756–1819), a translator of classical epic poems and an expert on antiquity, was included in the circle of pre-romantic “young” poets criticized in the satire Nowy Parnas (1818). Such an explanation can be provided by recreating the literary views of the author of the satire – Franciszek Morawski, who on the one hand suggested a new reading of Horace’s and Boileau’s poetics, which was fundamental for classicism, and, on the other, repeated the opinions about poetry expressed by Franciszek Ksawery Dmochowski in the 1780s. In the context of these views, the position of a poet-classicist for the “young” authors, occupied by Przybylski in Nowy Parnas, can be understood both as a perfect manifestation of corrupting good taste and purity of language (that is, the flaws of the poetry of the “young”) and as a perfect, in spite of its linguistic deficiencies, negation of mental and formal shallowness of the works of “the Polish youth”. Making Przybylski an ambivalently understood authority in the field of poetry justifies including his name in the criticism of the “young” writers, and at the same time, it does not allow for identifying him with them.