Ignacy Krasicki

Polish writer and cleric

• Born: February 3, 1735
• Birthplace: Dubiecko, Poland
• Died: March 14, 1801
• Place of death: Postdam, Prussia (now in Germany)

Poland’s foremost Enlightenment author, Krasicki wrote an impressive range of works, including the first Polish novel, that introduced Western European neoclassical influences into his country and added to the Age of Reason’s debates on such fundamental issues as education, public duty, and utopian society.

Early Life

Born into a family of landed gentry with no wealth but with impressive social connections, Ignacy Krasicki (eeg-NAHT-sih krah-SEETS-kee) grew up on an estate in southern Poland. He early chose a life in the Church over the only other profession then considered acceptable for a gentleman—the army. At the age of eight, therefore, Krasicki entered the Jesuit College in Lvov, where he studied until 1750. The next stage in his training was three years at the Catholic Seminary in Warsaw. In 1751, he was ordained. He rounded out his theological studies with a sojourn in Rome and Vienna from 1759 to 1761.

Life’s Work

Krasicki was remarkable not only in combining a brilliant career in the clergy with success as a writer but also in enjoying the patronage of both Stanisław II Augustus Poniatowski (r. 1764-1795), the Polish king, and Frederick the Great, the king of Prussia, whose country joined Russia and Austria in partitioning Poland as spoils in 1772. It was Stanisław II who paved the way for Krasicki’s achievements in both literature and the Church. In 1764, after being elected to the throne, he invited Krasicki to edit a recently established literary journal modeled on Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator (1709-1711). The Monitor, which Stanisław hoped to use as a vehicle for his projected reforms, was Krasicki’s first public venue for his urbane moralizing about society’s ills.

The young priest also became Stanisław’s chaplain and adviser and served on his commission for national education. Krasicki supported Stanisław’s efforts to create a flourishing national theater by writing drama criticism, as well as eight comedies heavily indebted to Molière. Two years later, Krasicki, then only thirty-two, was made bishop of Warmia (Ermeland), a northeastern region near the Prussian border that had long been colonized by both Poles and Prussians. In 1768, he gave up his long-distance editorship of The Monitor but continued to contribute translations and essays—so much so that in 1772, the year of the partition, the entire journal was devoted to his writings. Despite such commitment to the publication, however, Krasicki became a Prussian subject after the partition and did not return to Poland for almost a decade.

Krasicki’s first major original work was a mock-heroic epic called Myszeis (1775; the mouseiad), in which wit, linguistic skill, and old Polish legends about a king eaten by mice combined with neoclassical lucidity and proportion to excellent effect. His second mock-epic poem elicited stronger and more negative responses: Monachomachia (1778; the war of the monks) was a gently Horatian satire of superstition, institutional tyranny, and the ignorance, drunkenness, and other failings of monks in a small town. Already provocative as an anticlerical work by a bishop, Monachomachia also offended Polish patriots as a literary tribute to the Prussian king (whom Krasicki served as an adviser, considered a friend, and praised in personal letters). Eventually, Krasicki replied to his critics by writing Antimonachomachia (1780; the antiwar of the monks 1780), although this was more a sequel than a retraction.

Krasicki followed up the Monachomachia with Satyry (1779; satires), focusing his criticisms on the wealthy and the powerful. He continued his attack on such follies as drunkenness, hypocrisy, and cruelty to underlings, but he added the innovation of using far more irony than any of his literary predecessors. It is Bajki i przypowieści (1779; fables and parables; partial translation in Polish Fables, 1997), however, that most regard as his crowning achievement in poetry—perhaps because this collection proved the truth of his claim, “Witty fables are the most perfect aim of poetry.” While drawing on Aesop, Jean de La Fontaine, and even some eastern fables for material, Krasicki managed to give an original Polish flavor to his poems relaying wisdom through familiar subjects. He depicted a rather harsh world—where the strong and wise survive, while the weak and foolish perish—in impeccably concise, simple prose that is simultaneously dramatic and elegant.

Although his contemporaries dubbed him Prince of Poets, Krasicki likewise left his mark on Polish prose. Indeed, he produced what is essentially the first Polish novel, Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (1776; The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, 1992). This picaresque tale of a youth’s wanderings and visit to a utopian island was clearly indebted to such Western models as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Voltaire’s philosophical tales, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile: Ou, De l’éducation (1762; Emilius and Sophia: Or, A New System of Education, 1762-1763) and Du contrat social: Ou, Principes du droit politique (1762; A Treatise on the Social Contract: Or, The Principles of Politic Law, 1764).

More obviously Swiftian was Krasicki’s Historia (1779; story), in which a narrator called Grumdypp—after a Luggnagg immortal from Gulliver’s Travels—recounts his travels to past civilizations, always reserving his highest praise not for their rulers and soldiers but for their educators, philosophers, scientists, and lawmakers. Between these two novels came Pan Podstoli (1778-1784; Mr. Pantler), a work loosely structured around conversations on such ethical and social issues as education, farming, and civic duties. A valuable historical resource, Pan Podstoli is encyclopedic in its descriptions of late eighteenth century life among the gentry.

Over the years, alongside the prestige he gained as cleric, writer, and friend of kings, Krasicki enjoyed the humbler pleasures of collecting rare books, gardening, and sampling fancy jams and wines. In 1794, the various honors Frederick the Great had conferred on him—including the Orders of the White Eagle and of Saint Stanisław—culminated in the archbishopric of Gniezno (Gnesen). Krasicki died at the age of sixty-six in Potsdam, near Berlin, in 1801. His Bajki nowe (1803; new fables; partial translation in Polish Fables, 1997) was published posthumously in 1803.

Significance

Poland’s foremost eighteenth century poet, the learned and cosmopolitan Ignacy Krasicki was an exemplar of Enlightenment reason and moderation in his life as well as in his works. The same detachment, good will, and humor that characterized his writings kept him from patriotic fervor and made him as valuable a courtier to Frederick as to Stanisław II. Similarly, although he used his writings to urge the gentry into taking moral responsibility for improving their peasants’ lives, Krasicki never questioned the institution of serfdom itself or advocated radical reform.

By emulating such towering predecessors as Voltaire, Molière, Swift, and Alexander Pope in the many genres that he tackled—critical essays, satire, mock-heroic verse, history, comic plays, fables, novels—Krasicki almost single-handedly enabled Poland to catch up with the West’s high literary achievements in the Age of Reason. Although his moralizing accorded well with his religious vocation, his didacticism certainly sprang as much from his neoclassical devotion to improving humankind through reason and mockery as from his own clerical identity. Less acerbic than Voltaire, he nevertheless shared the French author’s belief that the writer should “teach with a smile.”

Like his Western counterparts of the same century, Krasicki displaced the Baroque era’s linguistic intricacy with vigorous and elegant simplicity, especially in his poetry and most of all in Bajki i przypowieści. He continued to demonstrate that he was a consummate stylist in his best-known prose work, The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, which is a testimony to the Enlightenment’s love of symmetry, concentrated but pellucid language, and confident plainness in the service of moral instruction.

Bibliography

Goscilo, Helena. “Introduction.” The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom, by Ignacy Krasicki. Translated by Thomas H. Hoisington. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1992. A comprehensive introduction, relating Krasicki’s novel to Enlightenment values and to a range of Western counterparts, which manages despite its brevity to pinpoint neatly the first Polish novel’s place in European literature.

Krzyżanowski, Julian. “Bishop of Warmia.” In A History of Polish Literature, translated by Doris Ronowicz. Warsaw: PWN-Polish Scientific, 1978. A balanced appraisal of Krasicki’s literary output that considers the author’s temperament as well as his genial literary persona.

Miłosz, Czesław. “Ignacy Krasicki.” In The History of Polish Literature. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Focuses on Krasicki’s success in stamping traditional forms with a distinctly Polish identity and credits him with introducing the novel of customs and manners into his national literature.

Welsh, David J. Ignacy Krasicki. New York: Twayne, 1969. Still the only full-length study in English, this monograph offers a detailed analysis of Krasicki’s complete writings, with separate chapters not just on each major work but also on such lesser publications as his personal letters, his Horatian Epistles, and his now-unperformed comedies. Welsh discusses Krasicki’s oeuvre within the framework of Western traditions while also linking it to the achievements of his Polish contemporaries and successors.