Maria by Antoni Malczewski – a Polish Novel / a Ukrainian Novel

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the interpretive possibilities hidden within the subititle “Ukrainian novel” used by Antoni Malczewski for his poem “Maria”. By tracing the shifting semantic field of the category “Ukrainianness” in 19th-century Polish culture, I attempt to recreate the spectrum of possible readings of the poem and also to demonstrate the consequences of these interpretative choices. The article provides arguments for reading the titular protagonist of Malczewski’s poem within the context of Ukrainian culture. In his final work “Blizzard in the Steppes” (1862), Grabowski revisits the motif of conflict between a Polish master and his Ukrainian subjects, centering the narrative on Marusia, a beautiful Ukrainian girl who becomes the symbolic heart of the story. In many respects, Marusia echoes Malczewski’s Maria: her name, beauty, and spiritual sensitivity directly recall the earlier heroine. Like Maria, she embodies moral fragility and transcendence, and her death signifies the collapse of hope for love and community. While Marusia’s Ukrainian identity is explicit, Maria’s origins remain ambiguous. Yet the heroine’s psychological and physical type deviates from the Polish noble stereotype, and scenes such as the funeral in the Orthodox church suggest an underlying Ukrainian context. This ambivalence mirrors broader representations of women in mid-nineteenth-century Polish literature set in Ukraine – figures caught between Polish lineage and Ukrainian roots, as in Goszczyński’s Orlika or Słowacki’s “Silver Dream of Salomea”. The hypothesis that Maria might share kinship with Ukrainian folk heroines – Marusias of dumky, including the legendary poet Marusia Czuraj – opens new interpretive perspectives. Malczewski, raised in Volhynia, could have drawn inspiration from such archetypes. Through this lens, “Maria. A Ukrainian Tale” reveals a hidden “Ukrainiannes”, inscribed in the symbolic tension between Polish and Ukrainian cultural worlds. The poem’s conclusion with images of Orthodox domes gleaming on the horizon and whispered prayers of Ukrainian women frames the tragedy within Eastern Christian eschatology. Thus, the narrative’s despair is counterbalanced by the hope of transcendence, transforming Maria into an allegory of cultural and spiritual borderlands, where love, death, and redemption intertwine.