Norwid in studies by Rolf Fieguth

This article aims discusses Rolf Fieguth’s studies of works by Norwid, focusing primarily on the German Slavist’s interpretations of the cycle Vade-mecum and the long poem Quidam. The first work reconstructed here, along with its assumptions and conclusions, is Fieguth’s 1985 study on “poetry in a critical phase”and the second is the 2005 essay on the comparative contexts of Norwid’s famous cycle (the latter was published in Polish in 2011). A lot of room is devoted in this section to Fieguth’s analysis of distortions introduced by Norwid at various levels of the poem’s organization. These remarks are complemented with an account of Fieguth’s comparatist conceptof “cultural confrontation,” which goes beyond dualistic accounts of literary creativity, revealing the invariably broad, European context of meetings between poets and texts, facilitated by the process of national cultures permeating each other. The second part of the article is devoted to Fieguth’s 2014 book Zaproszenie do „Quidama”. Portret poematu Cypriana Norwida [An invitation to Quidam. A portrait of Cyprian Norwid’s long poem]. Reflections on this publication concern not only its detailed findings about Norwid’s long poem but also the critic’s methodological assumptions, which have helped him to update the long-standing genre in the history of literature, namely the “author and his particular work” type of monograph. Among the issues addressed in the book, the article discusses, in particular, the difficulties accompanying interpretations of Quidamand the question of Norwid’s classicism. The third part of the article draws attention to Fieguth’s remarks onNorwid made in recent years (2017, 2018, 2020). The article thus summarizes Rolf Fieguth’s thirty years of research on the most important poetic achievements of the Polish poet.