“Redefining National Art in Life”

Jenni Drozdek

By the late eighteenth century, Poland ceased to exist, having been subsumed into three different cultural and political regimes – Austria, Russia, and Prussia. Throughout the nineteenth century, therefore, the Polish press reinforced the significance of maintaining Polish national identity. Although the various polemics that arose among journalists and writers were most deeply felt in political and social discourse, criticism on art and literature resulted in similar vociferous debates. Indeed, critics often judged Polish art and literature on their capacity to reinforce and reinvigorate national pride and identity. Art and literary criticism and political discourse, therefore, were often mutually inclusive.

In 1897, however, the establishment of Life, a journal marked by its promotion of “pure” art and literature and its insistent detraction from the didactic expression of nationalism, served as a dramatic fracture in Polish journalism. The journal’s changing editors were key members and initiators of the literary, musical, and artistic movement of “Young Poland.” The defining characteristics of Young Poland, a term which was often used interchangeably with “modernism” in late-nineteenth century Poland, were self-expression and the rejection of naturalism and didacticism. My paper discusses how the editors of Life, which served as an organ for Young Poland, redefined what it meant to create “national” art and dealt with the presumed conflicting relationship between international modernism and nationalism.