Maria Janion is dead. The outstanding humanist, professor, and literary historian was 93 years old
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Maria Janion is dead. The outstanding humanist, professor, and literary historian was 93 years old

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Prof. Maria Janion – historian of literature, ideas and imagination, professor of humanities.

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The information about the death of Professor Maria Janion was provided by OKO.press and “Tygodnik Powszechny”.

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“It’s a sad weekend – we said goodbye to Józefa Hennelowa yesterday, and today we have to inform about the death of Maria Janion. The outstanding literary critic and expert in literature passed away today in Warsaw. She was 93 years old” – wrote on Sunday evening on Twitter of the Book Institute.

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– She left as she wanted – in her home, among books. She fell asleep while reading. She was an amazing person in every sense of the word. Noble and ethical. She was aware until the last moment, she cheered us up to the last moment – said Kazimiera Szczuka, her friend and student, in an interview with OKO.press.

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A special place in Polish humanities

Maria Janion was born in Mońki near Vilnius on December 24, 1926, exactly 128 years after Mickiewicz. She came from a poor family – a single mother supported her and her brother, trying very hard to ensure that their children were educated. During the occupation that the family spent in Vilnius, Maria and her brother attended secret classes.

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Prof. Maria Janion was 93 years oldTomasz Gzell / PAP

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Professionally associated with, among others, the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Gdańsk and the University of Warsaw. In the 1970s she became involved in opposition activities – she was among the founders of the independent Society of Scientific Courses. In August 1980, she signed a letter from 64 intellectuals supporting the strikes.

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Maria Janion has a special place in Polish humanities. She has developed her own, very personal and contemporary understanding of Romanticism. After many years, when Romantic poetry was treated as a kind of untouchable historical and literary open-air museum, her “Romantic Rush” (1975) was a revelation for many. Under her pen, romantic characters came to life, a romantic understanding of the world suddenly turned out to be the key to understanding the present day. Maria Janion brought Romanticism out of the ghetto of literary and historical terms, creating a category out of it that defines a certain way of thinking and evaluating the world, valid in all times and epochs.

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“I idealized Poles as an eminently heroic nation”

“Yes, the truth is that, following the Romantics, I drew the apologies of Polish romantic madness. And I idealized Poles as an eminently heroic nation. And I saw in our messianism, above all, a righteous glorification of Polish suffering” – admitted the researcher of Romanticism, reserving a paragraph later that already 20 years ago it began to change the assessment. After the breakthrough of 1989, the Polish cult of suffering began to be perceived as a mental burden that could not be shaken off. Janion, who saw the demolished Warsaw, was far from glorifying the Warsaw Uprising, and regretted that the Polish Church was so poorly engaged in reflection on the fate of Polish Jews during the occupation.

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“Messianism was the ideology of a nation in captivity, designed by Romanticism, it was spreading the glory of a martyred nation, suffering like Christ for humanity, which will be saved by the + Holy Wounds of the Polish Nation + – as Wincenty Pol wrote. (…) To spread messianism today, one must either to treat Poland as the chosen one of God from among the nations of the world, endowed with a special mission, or to maintain that Poland is still in captivity. Or both “- said Janion in the book” Not good child “.

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According to Maria Janion, romanticism is, above all, the affirmation of freedom in all its dimensions. Perhaps that is why she fought for recognition in Polish literature of the place occupied by groups deprived of this freedom in many respects, such as women, gays and Jews. Considered the patron saint of Polish feminists, the author of the book “Women and the Spirit of Otherness” attacked right-wing politicians several times for glorifying the male and heterosexual Polish national myth. She protested against the construction of the Roman Dmowski monument in Warsaw, defended the artist Dorota Nieznalska, and in interviews she protested against calling abortion “killing life”. She mentioned in interviews that she worked for many years from 6 a.m. to midnight, it has only relaxed this regime a bit in recent years. Work is reading and writing, family is students. She wrote by hand and gave manuscripts to publishers. As she confessed in interviews – she lived very ascetic. Among the students who were invited to the professor’s house, there are legends about the number of books gathered there. Janion herself used to say that sometimes it was easier for her to borrow a book from the library than to dig through it at home. Apparently, literary criticism and the history of painting are grouped in the hall, the smaller room is romanticism, where esoteric literature is also collected. The kitchen is the area of ​​the Great French Revolution, the bathroom – fiction, sociology and philosophy.

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She raised many generations of humanists

Maria Janion was a literary critic, an outstanding expert on Polish and European Romanticism. She raised many generations of Polish humanists (a master – that’s what her students said about Maria Janion). She was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Learning, the Warsaw Scientific Society and the Literary Society of Adam Mickiewicz.

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She has written over 20 books, including “Zygmunt Krasiński, debut i maturity” (1962), “Romantic fever” (1975), “Life after death by Konrad Wallenrod” (1990), “Women and the spirit of otherness” (1995), “General’s Cry” . Essays on War (1998), “Vampire: A Symbolic Biography” (2002), “Incredible Slavicism: Literary Phantasms” (2006) and “Hero, Conspiracy, Death: Jewish Lectures” (2009).

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In 2018, Maria Janion was honored with the PEN Club Award. Jan Parandowski. – Her work is a metaphysics of culture – said the president of PEN Adam Pomorski. – Janion’s creative method is “vibrating anxiety” – said Dorota Siwicka, a researcher of romanticism. Siwicka – a researcher of romanticism and a student of Maria Janion – pointed out that, unlike many romantics, Maria Janion never lost her trust in books. – Now, when she does not leave the house anymore, she says that she is happy because she finally has time to read everything she wanted to read in her life – she assessed. In her opinion, Janion had an unusual intuition of searching in culture and history of places and moments that arouse anxiety, which should be clarified and examined in order to avoid the catastrophe of the national subconscious. – The hermeneutic of Janion, the translation of hidden meanings, comes from anxiety and the need to react, that is, the metaphysics of anxiety. It is a potentially therapeutic and saving sense of research into history – emphasized Siwicka.

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Winner of many awards

In 1980 Maria Janion was awarded the Prize of the Jurzykowski Foundation in New York, and in 1991 she received the Prize of Literature in the field of essay writing for the book “The Posthumous Life of Konrad Wallenrod”. In 1999 Janion was awarded the Prize of the Great Cultural Foundation for 1998. In 2007, she received the Gold Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis. In the same year, she received a special “Polityka” Passport for the creator of culture. Former laureate of the City of Gdańsk Award in the Field of Culture “Splendor Gedanensis” for 2007.

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In 2009, she was awarded the Award of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage. In the same year, she received the “Hyacinth” Award by the Equality Foundation, and a year later the Special Award of the Congress of Women. In 2012, in France, prof. Janion with the National Order of Merit. In 2018, she was awarded the Polish PEN Club Award. Jan Parandowski.

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Maria Janion died on Sunday in Warsaw. She was 93 years old.

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photo-source">Main photo source: Tomasz Gzell / PAP

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