The Golden Age

Curiously, Krakow Cathedral houses both the bones of the legendary dragon and the remains of some of the country's greatest poets. In any case, the first works to mention the city also oscillate between fiction and reality. It was first mentioned by Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub, a great traveller born in Catalonia in the early 10th century, who described it as a great trading city in his Book of Roads and Kingdoms. It then reappears in the manuscript Life of Methodius, dedicated to the saint and his brother Cyril, the inventors of the Glagolitic alphabet on which Cyrillic is based. It states that Krakow was the capital of the state founded by the Vislanes, the Slavic tribe that had occupied the region since the 7th century. Then there's a priceless document, found completely by chance in an ecclesiastical archive, which recalls the baptism in 966 of Mieszko I, the first Polish sovereign, and the importance of Krakow at the time. This manuscript, Dagome Iudex, is undoubtedly the work of a copyist monk - not very meticulous in view of the numerous typos - who in the 11th century gave a summary of an older act placing Poland under the protection of Pope John XV. Last but not least, Wincenty Kadlubek, bishop of Krakow from 1207 to 1218, recounted the legend of Krakus in his Chronica Polonorum, a Latin-language work of great historical value, as it summarizes the events that marked the beginnings of the Kingdom of Poland. This medieval chronicle also contains a romanticized biography of Stanislaus of Szczepanów, the bishop of Krakow whom King Boleslaw II is said to have strangled with his own hands in 1079 on the altar of the church of Skalka (Kazimierz district) for a dark story of revenge or jealousy. Erected as a martyr, Stanislas is now Poland's patron saint. Bogurdzica, the religious song that served as Poland's national anthem, was probably composed in his honor between the 11th and 13th centuries. This founding text is considered one of the earliest Polish literary texts.

Having just recovered from the Tartar attacks that almost destroyed it in 1241, Krakow was reborn with a vengeance, as evidenced by the fact that it was at Wawel Castle in the late 13th century that the first translation of a biblical text into Polish was performed. The Psalter takes its name from the monastery where it was discovered in 1827 - St. Florian in Austria - and has since been repatriated to its country of origin. It was in Krakow - again! - in 1364, and remained the country's only university until the 16th century. Founded by Kazimierz the Great, in the 19th century it was renamed the Jagiellonian in homage to King Wladyslaw, who definitively confirmed its existence in 1400. A nerve center of cultural life, it welcomed the greatest intellectuals throughout the Golden Age, which lasted in Poland until the 17th century. Pupils or professors, we must be careful not to confine them to the most famous of them all, Nicolaus Copernicus, for it also saw such illustrious men as Matthew of Krakow (c.1335-1410) and Stanislaw of Skarbimierz (c.1360-1431) pass through its walls, both known for their sermons, a particular genre in which men of faith questioned questions of society, particularly the law, advocating tolerance and equality. The University's rector was Pawel Wlodkowic (1370-1435), who defended the property rights of pagans and opposed violent proselytism, and its pupil was Jan Dlugosz (1415-1480), a future canon and diplomat who wrote a colossal 12-volume History of Poland, a valuable source of information about his country. Other humanists included the great German poet Conrad Celtes(Quatuor Libri Amorum, 1502), who founded the learned society Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana in 1488, and the philosopher Laurent Corvin.

The era also witnessed the revolutionary arrival of printing, a process initiated in Krakow by Bavarian Kasper Straube in 1473, who the following year put to press an Almanach cracoviense ad annum 1474, and which quickly attracted emulators: Jan Haller published The Statutes of the Kingdom of Poland, and Schweipolt Fiol was the first in the world, in 1491, to print in Cyrillic script. Two former students of the University of Krakow also contributed to the evolution of the Polish language: Mikolaj Rej (1505-1569) and Jan Kochanowski (1530-1584). The former was born into a noble family in 1505 and went on to become a deputy in the Republic of the Two Nations. Above all, he chose to abandon Latin - which he mastered perfectly and which had been in use since the country's Christianization - in favor of Polish. His work was eclectic, ranging from the piquant Court débat entre un seigneur, un maire et un curé, to the moralistic Le Marchand, figure du jugement dernier, to the sensitive Portrait véridique de la vie d'un homme vertueux, which earned him the title of "Father of Polish Poetry", a title he disputed with Jan Kochanowski. Kochanowski was born in 1530, also into a wealthy family. An avid traveler who criss-crossed Italy, it was there that he took up his pen to try his hand at poetry, in Latin and Polish. His influence was especially notable from a linguistic point of view, as he helped to establish standards and a very rigorous versification, thus modernizing the language for a long time to come. His collection Thrènes, written after the death of his daughter, plays a fundamental role in the history of Polish literature.

Decline and renewal

In fact, it was not until the very end of the 18th century that a poet was born who would have such an impact on the Polish language, even though the country had in the meantime experienced a fine Baroque period - led in particular by Jan Andrzej Morsztyn, born near Krakow in 1621 and the author of Luth, a remarkable example of the Sarmatist movement specific to Poland - and the Enlightenment, which saw the flowering of theater. This great poet is Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), whose body now lies in the crypt of Wawel Cathedral. He fully embodies Romanticism, in the most political sense of the word. Indeed, three years before his birth, the Republic of Two Nations had been dismantled, and Poland was already the plaything of foreign powers who were dividing it up with impunity. Adam Mickiewicz would try his hand at a number of poetic veins before coming to fruition in 1820 with L'Ode à la jeunesse, a radically romantic work that was not published until much later, as it was deemed too revolutionary. His second collection, Grażyna (1823), established him as a leader of the movement and forever inscribed him in the history of Polish literature. Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) was also violently attacked - even censored by Russia - for his patriotic novels, and was forbidden to write about his country's history. This did not prevent him from achieving huge international success with Quo vadis? which won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905, nor from publishing Krzyżacy in serial form in newspapers, published in French in two volumes(Les Chevaliers teutoniques and Les Remparts de Cracovie).

In 1869, a father and his 12-year-old son, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, settle in Krakow. Although the man who would gain posterity as Joseph Conrad for his many novels(Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, Typhoon, The Golden Arrow...) would rarely mention the city where he grew up, it would not hold this against him, and would continue to cultivate his memory as much as his admiration. That same year, Stanisław Wyspiański was born in Krakow, an artist of many hats - from painting to directing, from writing to architecture - who would become the figurehead of the so-called "Young Poland" movement. This revival, which spread across all the arts at the very end of the 19th century, and particularly in Krakow, could be described as Modernist. It stemmed from the choice of "art for art's sake", in violent opposition to a society deemed "fin de siècle", as much for the values it advocated - capitalism, domination of the bourgeoisie - as for the anguish that gripped it. The talent of these new-style writers crystallized in the magazine Życie between 1897 and 1900, under the impetus and direction of Stanisław Przybyszewski, an eminent representative of decadentism.

Alas, this effervescence, which had almost succeeded in becoming optimistic, would be overtaken by war, the first, but above all the second, which in Krakow rhymed with ghetto, one of the five established by the Third Reich in Poland. The story of a non-Jewish man who decided to stay put, whatever the cost, will live on in these dark years. Tadeusz Pankiewicz wrote his memoirs and the fruit of the diary he kept day after day during the war in La Pharmacie du ghetto de Cracovie, which has been translated into French by Editions Solin. The Second World War was also at the heart of the work of Michel Borwicz, born Maksymilian Boruchowicz in 1911 in Tarnów, not far from Krakow, and who died in Nice in 1987. He played an active role in theArmia Krajowa, the Polish Resistance, and later performed a genuine duty of remembrance by collecting numerous archives and publishing collections of personal accounts, including Écrits des condamnés à mort sous l'occupation nazie, still available in digital format from Gallimard. Finally, it would be impossible to speak of literary Krakow without mentioning the woman who was not born here but spent most of her life, Wisława Szymborska, a major poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Her work mirrors the history of her country: initially strongly influenced by socialist realism, she eventually freed herself from it and became all the more free and critical of a regime that would not give way definitively to an independent republic until 1989. The poems Wisława Szymborska wrote between 1957 and 2009 can be found in French in Gallimard's Poetry collection under the title De la mort sans exagérer.