Flaubert in the eyes of nineteenth-century Polish literary critics

Abstract

The article’s main goal is to revise the general view — established thanks to Kulczycka-Saloni’s research — that genres of realist and naturalistic novels in nineteenth-century Poland developed primarily under the patronage of Zola. However, detailed research of Polish literary criticism in the latter half of the nineteenth century proves that the influence of Flaubert was of equal, if not greater, significance. It was this author’s works that would spark heated debates, in which ideological arguments were mixed with the first attempts to analyse Flaubert’s novelistic method. Interestingly, the arguments happened not only among select critics like Zamostowski or Kraszewski but also among entire milieus around various literary journals like Przegląd Tygodniowy, Tygodnik Ilustrowany, or Kłosy. This brought about the rise of Sygietyński, whose vast and thorough body of research on the French author preceded many of the observations by Flaubert’s later researchers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.