THE COSSACKS IN POLISH LITERATURE: CRITICAL RECEPTION OF A. SEREDNICKI

Abstract

The proposed article states the special importance that comparative aspects of the reception of Ukrainics in foreign literary studies and, in particular, in the imagological field of Polish-Ukrainian literary relations and mutual influences are gaining today. The author emphasizes the important role played by the well-known literary critic, writer and translator Antoni Serednicki in establishing and studying the history of Polish-Ukrainian cultural relations.

The purpose of the study is to analyze and summarize the literary and critical works of A. Serednicki, dedicated to the review of works by Polish writers of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, in which the topic of the Cossacks was raised from various imagological perspectives. To achieve this goal, the following tasks are set: 1) to distinguish in the general corpus of literary and critical works by A. Serednicki the studies, the subject matter of which partially or fully relates to the imagological reception of the Ukrainian Cossacks by Polish literature; 2) to outline and characterize the course of literary critical evaluations of the main events and historical figures of the Cossack era traced in the works of A. Serednicki; 3) to analyze the imagological aspects of the controversy in Polish literary criticism around H. Sienkiewicz’s novel «By Fire and Sword».

As a result of the study, it was found that historical events and key figures of the Cossack era in various aspects of their imagological reception by Polish literature were in the circle of constant attention of A. Serednicki. The scholar systematized and characterized them in a large number of scientific studies, among which the most thorough and detailed discussion of the Cossacks in terms of their perception by Polish writers of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries is revealed in the article «Cossacks in Polish Literature». The author of the article traces the content and dynamics of the historical course of critically diverse literary imagological assessments of events and political figures of the Cossack era, analyzes in detail the circumstances and pathos of the literary and critical controversy around H. Sienkiewicz’s novel «By Fire and Sword».