"A truly national poet" : with Kochanowski against people like Makaroński and Nowosilcow

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This paper examines the ways in which Polish Enlightenment writers, active in different phases of this period in Poland, perceived Jan Kochanowski and used the memory of this poet and his poetic output for the purposes of the messages conveyed by their texts. The Author concentrates on two names: Franciszek Bohomolec, as one of the most important authors of early Enlightenment in Poland and Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz, a writer shaped in the sentimental environment of Puławy, whose literary activity spanned from the reign of Stanislaus II to the Great Emigration. The literary output of these two men includes formally diverse persuasive texts, such as journalistic prose in the form of dialogue, eulogies and visionary poems. It seems that these works reflected most distinctively, and in a way characteristic of the main currents of that formation, Kochanowski’s role in shaping of the cultural consciousness of the representatives of the Polish "Age of Light". In these texts, the poet of Czarnolas appears as the patron of the emancipation of the national language, a symbol of the culture-forming role of the Polish language (Bohomolec), and a figure of the greatness of the free Commonwealth founded on the chivalric ideal cultivated in Kochanowski’s epinicia and other poems (e.g. Jezda do Moskwy; Proporzec albo hołd pruski), forming a component part of the Sarmatian world-view. Niemcewicz later recalled this ideal in a nostalgic but consolatory appeal, written in the circumstances of the partition period.