Maria Janion

(1926-2020) – historian of Polish and European Romantic literature, essayist, literary critic, lecturer.

In 1939, Janion finished comprehensive school in Vilnius, where she also attended clandestine secondary education classes during World War II and belonged to the underground Polish Scouting and Guiding Association, affiliated with the Home Army. After the war, she and her family settled in Bydgoszcz.

She debuted in 1945 with the article “Król i szlachcic” (The King and the Nobleman) published in the weekly “Kuźnica” (issue 10, signed “mj”; a polemic with J. A. Król: “O poezji chłopskiej” – About Peasant Poetry – “Wieś”, issue 12/13). It was also there that she published articles and reviews in the following years. In 1946 she started attending a course in literary criticism led by Stefan Żółkiewski at “Kuźnica”. In 1948 she joined the editorial team of the weekly “Wieś”, where she wrote reviews. In the same year, in “Twórczość” (issue 2), she published her first larger scholarly piece: “Zagadnienie fikcji literackiej ze stanowiska socjologicznej teorii literatury” (The Question of Literary Fiction from the Perspective of Sociological Theory of Literature), co-written with Tadeusz Drewnowski. She graduated in Polish studies at the University of Łódź. In November 1948 she started work at the Institute of Literary Studies, IBL (which became part of the Polish Academy of Sciences, PAN, in 1951) in Warsaw as a junior lecturer. She worked there until her retirement in 1997.

As a literary critic, she published sketches and reviews in periodicals including “Pamiętnik Literacki” (since 1950), “Nowa Kultura” (since 1952), “Życie Literackie” (since 1952) and “Twórczość” (since 1958). In 1956 she was the academic secretary at IBL. At the same time, in 1957 she started work at the Higher Pedagogical School (WSP) in Gdańsk. In 1963 she became an associate professor. From the following year onwards, she headed the Department of the History of Artistic Forms in Polish Literature, and from 1968 – the Department of the History of 19^th-Century Polish Literature (until 1890) at IBL. From 1966 she was appointed to the Committee on Polish Literary Studies at PAN (since 2003, the Committee on Literary Studies at PAN). In the years 1968-78 she worked as the editor-in-chief of IBL’s publishing series “Historia i Teoria Literatury. Studia” (History and Theory of Literature. Studies). In 1973 she became a full professor. In 1974 she started leading doctoral seminars at IBL. In 1977 she was one of the founders of the illegal Society for Academic Courses.

Since 1957, she was a passionate and committed academic teacher. She had a longstanding relationship with the University of Gdańsk (in 1982 she was dismissed due to political repression, and re-hired the following academic year), with the University of Warsaw and doctoral courses at IBL PAN since 1990, and since 1992 – with the School of Social Sciences at PAN’s Institute of Philosophy and Sociology.

She edited and co-edited many scholarly publications, including the book series “Biblioteka Romantyczna” (The Library of Romanticism), which includes a few dozen volumes. She was a regular member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences and full member of PAN. In 1994 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Gdańsk. In the years 1997-2004 she served on the jury of the Nike Literary Award. In 2004 she became part of the programme council of the Polish Book Institute at the Ministry of Culture.

The subjects of her seventeen books (three of which she co-wrote with Maria Żmigrodzka) and several hundred articles are not limited to either Polish philology, or strictly to the 19^th century. Her scholarly interests include the history of ideas, history of symbolic imagination, aesthetic styles and forms, and methodologies of literary inquiry, especially hermeneutics: “Humanistyka: poznanie i terapia” (Humanities: Cognition and Therapy, 1974), “Odnawianie znaczeń” (The Renewal of Meanings, 1980). Maria Janion is the author of many works about European Romanticism and 20^th-century literature; the central figures of her research (apart from Polish Romantics) included François-René de Chateaubriand, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Gustave Flaubert, Günter Grass and Maria Komornicka, Witold Gombrowicz, Miron Białoszewski and Jerzy Kosiński.

Thanks to works by Janion – who started out as a specialist in 19^th-century national poetry in the period between insurrections and in Zygmunt Krasiński’s writings – Polish research on Romanticism developed in a few distinctive directions. In “Romantyzm i historia” (Romanticism and History, 1978), Janion and Żmigrodzka included a synthesis of Romantic historiosophic thought, describing the interpenetration of the course of time and the flow of ideas, defining the meaning of human existence within history. In the books “Czas formy otwartej” (The Time of Open Form, 1985), “Życie pośmiertne Konrada Wallenroda” (The Posthumous Life of Konrad Wallenrod, 1990) or “Projekt krytyki fantazmatycznej” (The Project of Phantasmatic Criticism, 1991) Janion turned towards “the existence of people and ghosts”, or, to put it in general terms, the domain of imagination as what controls our spiritual life. It is characteristic of her scholarship to transcend the collective, patriotic, Tyrtaean dimension towards individual signs of existence as the highest good, and simultaneously a space where the modern self is created. This perspective is noticeable already in the book “Gorączka romantyczna” (Romantic Fever, 1975).

Janion revisited the clash between projects of collective and individual cultures in the 1990s. A reference to Goethe’s principle of “Bildung” resulted in a concept of the spiritual community of individuals, shaping their subjectivity through encounters with culture. In the essay collection “Czy będziesz wiedział, co przeżyłeś?” (Will You Know What You Experienced?, 1996) Janion searched for ways to preserve human spiritual integrity the face of escalating consumerism and what is called a crisis of values. “Odyseja wychowania” (The Odyssey of Upbringing, 1998) co-written by Janion and Żmigrodzka, is wholly devoted to Goethe’s concept of man. Still, Janion continued to be interested in the shape of Polish wartime imaginarium and in attempts to redefine the canon of Polish patriotism, as evidenced by the book “Płacz generała. Eseje o wojnie” (The General’s Tears. Essays about War, 1998).

In her last works, the author turned towards figures of otherness in modern culture – the book “Kobiety i duch inności” (Women and the Spirit of Otherness, 1996) opens feminist horizons of research into literature and art, and the extensive studies “Tematy żydowskie u Mickiewicza” (Jewish Themes in Mickiewicz) and “Legion żydowski Mickiewicza” (Mickiewicz’s Jewish Legion, 1998) touch upon the hitherto neglected themes of the author’s attitude towards Jews and reveal the Judaic contexts of his religiousness.

A separate item in Janion’s oeuvre is the multi-volume series “Transgresje” (Transgressions, 1981-88), published with a group of University of Gdańsk students. It was a unique anthology of literary and essayistic texts of global humanities, sometimes in original translation. It featured surprising combinations of excerpts, texts quoted across a few dozen pages or in a few sentences, and arranged according to themes of modern anthropology, such as Galley-slaves of Sensitivity, Persons, Masks, Misfits, Children. On top of this the series included transcripts of Janion’s lectures from Gdańsk and seminar discussions, as well as works by students. In the 1980s the interdisciplinary Transgressions were an important counterpoint to scholarship at the time – bureaucratised and hierarchic.

She received many awards, including Aleksander Brückner Prize awarded by PAN’s Social Sciences Department in 1962 (for the monograph “Zygmunt Krasiński, debiut i dojrzałość” – Zygmunt Krasiński, Debut and Maturity), the “Życie Literackie” Award in the Essay category (for “Romantyzm, rewolucja, marksizm. Colloquia gdańskie” – Romanticism, Revolution, Marxism. The Gdańsk Colloquia), the Grand Prize of the Culture Foundation (1998), the Kazimierz Wyka Award (2001), the “Crystal Looking Glass” awarded by the editors of the magazine “Zwierciadło” (2004), the special Polityka’s Passport for culture creators (2006), the Splendor Gedanensis City of Gdańsk Award in the Field of Culture (2007), the Minister of Culture and National Heritage Prize (2009), the “Hyacinth” Prize awarded by the Equality Foundation (2009), the Women’s Congress Special Prize (2010), the Jan Parandowski Polish PEN Club Award (2018). She received the gold Gloria Artis Medal for Merit to Culture (2007) and the French National Order of Merit (2012). She was buried in the Professors’ Avenue at the Powązki Military Cemetery in Warsaw.