Stefan Żeromski and the Crisis of Polish Nationalism

Abstract

Striving for national survival under foreign rule, which dominated the Polish political scene in the nineteenth century, was both shaped and reflected by literature, whose political role was taken for granted and hence pursued by generations of writers. This situation engendered masterpieces of poetic inspiration in the crucial period of Romanticism; it also, however, fostered populist forms of nationalistic writing; patriotic songs and somewhat unsophisticated, yet frequently well-written, novels.