Jan Kochanowski

Kochanowski, Jan (1530–1584), Polish and Neo-Latin poet, humanist, royal secretary and courtier, arguably the outstanding literary figure of the Slavic world before the Romantic age. Kochanowski was born to a middling gentry family of Little Poland. He matriculated at the standard age of fourteen in the Cracow Academy in 1544, then spent 1551–1552 at the Lutheran university in Königsberg, where he once returned (1555–1556), perhaps in search of a patron at Duke Albert Frederick's court. Over the years 1552–1559, Kochanowski spent three longer periods at the University of Padua, where he studied with one of Italy's leading humanist scholars, Francesco Robortello. He completed his study years with a tour of France (1558/1559), where he came into contact with the poet Pierre de Ronsard.

Upon his return to Poland in 1559, Kochanowski began a fifteen-year period of activities connected with politics and the royal court. We find him among the clients of Little Polish magnates, including the Calvinist palatine of Lublin, Jan Firlej, and crown vice-chancellor (later bishop of Cracow) Piotr Myszkowski, thanks to whose patronage he became one of King Sigismund II Augustus's secretaries and courtiers. Around 1571 Kochanowski's ties with court life began to loosen, and he retreated more and more to his country estate at Czarnolas in Little Poland, where he lived from 1575 until his death in 1584.

Kochanowski began as a Neo-Latin poet, but his place in literary history is secured by his pioneering work in Polish. This "father of Polish literature" attempted to establish Polish models for the entire canon of classical and humanistic genres. During his court period, Kochanowski focused on poetry in an epic tonality (Susanna, c. 1562; Chess, between 1562 and 1566) and occasional poetry, as well as political poetry (Harmony, 1564; Satyr, or the Wild Man, c. 1564). He gradually shifted toward what would be his strength, lyric poetry. A central work here was his Songs (published posthumously in 1585), composed over nearly twenty years and based on Horatian and Petrarchan models. Over the same years Kochanowski worked on his Trifles, a collection of mostly short poems, often of personal or topical content, ranging in style from epic to anacreontic. They continue to find imitators among Polish poets. Kochanowski was the author of Poland's first Renaissance tragedy, The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys (written probably c. 1565 but first performed in 1578, before King Stephen Báthory, and published that year). From the last, rural period come his Laments (1580) on the death of his beloved daughter Urszula. Kochanowski began work on his masterpiece—a versified Psalter, based on the model of George Buchanan's Latin version (among others)—while still at court, but he did the lion's share of the work at Czarnolas, publishing it only in 1579.

Kochanowski received recognition as the premier Polish poet during his lifetime, and traditions of reading and imitation of his work have continued uninterrupted. His Psalter was issued twenty-five times by the middle of the seventeenth century, and it influenced similar projects in Russian, Romanian, Lithuanian, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Lusatian. Polish Catholics and Protestants sang his versions of the Psalms in their churches (often without realizing whose they were), and seventeenth-century Polish Catholics sought to make him into an orthodox post-Tridentine Catholic, evidently troubled by the tonalities of Horatian epicureanism, Senecan stoicism, and Erasmian irenicism in his life and work.

Bibliography

Fiszman, Samuel, ed. The Polish Renaissance in its European Context. Bloomington, Ind., and Indianapolis, 1988.

Langlade, Jacques. Jean Kochanowski: L'homme, le penseur, le poète lyrique. Paris, 1932.

Pelc, Janusz. Jan Kochanowski: Szczyt renesansu w literaturze polskiej. Warsaw, 1980.

—DAVID FRICK

Jan Kochanowski
Noble Family	Kochanowski.
Coat of Arms	Korwin
Parents	Piotr Kochanowski; Anna, née Białaczowska.
Consorts	Dorota, née Podlodowska.
Children	Urszula, Hanna, Ewa, Poliksena, Halszka, Krystyna, Jan (posthumous) [1]
Date of Birth	1530
Place of Birth	Sycyna
Date of Death	August 22, 1584
Place of Death	Lublin

Jan Kochanowski (1530 – August 22, 1584) was a Polish Renaissance poet who established poetic patterns that would become integral to Polish literary language. [1]

He is commonly regarded as the greatest Polish poet as well as the greatest Slavic poet prior to the 19th century.^[2]

Contents 1 Life 2 Works 3 See also 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links 7 Further reading

Life

Kochanowski

Kochanowski was born at Sycyna, near Radom, Poland. Little is known of his early education. At fourteen, fluent in Latin, he was sent to the Kraków Academy. After graduation in 1547 at age seventeen, he attended the University of Königsberg (Królewiec), in Ducal Prussia, and Padua University in Italy. At Padua, Kochanowski came in contact with the great humanist scholar Francis Robortello. Kochanowski closed his fifteen-year period of studies and travels with a final visit to France, where he met the poet Pierre Ronsard.

In 1559 Kochanowski returned to Poland for good, where he remained active as a humanist and Renaissance poet. He spent the next fifteen years close to the court of King Sigismund II Augustus, serving for a time as royal secretary. In 1574, following the decampment of Poland's recently elected King Henry of Valois (whose candidacy to the Polish throne Kochanowski had supported), Kochanowski settled on a family estate at Czarnolas ("Blackwood") to lead the life of a country squire. In 1575 he married Dorota Podlodowska, with whom he had seven children.

Kochanowski is sometimes referred to in Polish as "Jan z Czarnolasu" ("John of Blackwood"). It was there that he wrote his most memorable works, including The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys and the Laments.

Kochanowski died, probably of a heart attack, in Lublin on 22 August 1584.

Works

Dismissal of the Greek Envoys (1578)

Kochanowski never ceased to write in Latin; however, his main achievement was the creation of Polish-language verse forms that made him a classic for his contemporaries and posterity.

Kochanowski's first major masterpiece was Odprawa posłów greckich (The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys, 1578; recently translated into English by Indiana University's Bill Johnston). This was a blank-verse tragedy that recounted an incident leading up to the Trojan War. It was the first tragedy written in Polish, and its theme of the responsibilities of statesmanship continues to resonate to this day. The play was performed at the wedding of Jan Zamoyski and Krystyna Radziwiłł at Ujazdów Castle in Warsaw on January 12, 1578.^[3]

Kochanowski with dead Urszulka. Matejko painting inspired by 1580 Laments

The masterpiece for which Kochanowski is best remembered is Treny (Threnodies, 1580, translated into English in 1995 by Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney as Laments). It is a series of nineteen elegies upon the death of his beloved two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Urszula.

The Laments move the reader with their unaffected sentiments, expressed with a skill worthy, in a later generation, of a Shakespeare.

See also

• Davids' Psalter
• List of Poles
• Political fiction
• Politics in fiction

Notes

1. ^ Jan Kochanowski - życiorys
2. ^ Paul Murray, "The Fourth Friend: Poetry in a Time of Affliction," Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer 2005), pp. 19-39.
3. ^ Stefan Kieniewicz, ed., Warszawa w latach 1526-1795 (Warsaw in the Years 1526-1795), vol. II, Warsaw, 1984, ISBN 8301033231, pp. 157-58.

References

Kochanowski family epitaphs at Zwoleń church. The poet's is at center.

• Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 2nd edition, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983, pp. 60-80.
• Jan Kochanowski, Laments, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Seamus Heaney, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1995.

External links

• Selection of translated poems
• Works by Jan Kochanowski at Project Gutenberg

Further reading

• David J. Welsh, Jan Kochanowski, New York, Twayne Publishers, 1974, ISBN 0-8057-2490-7. Reviewed by Harold B. Segel in The Slavic Review, vol. 35, no. 3. (Sept. 1976), pp. 583–84. [2]

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