Norwid's Circle

Norwid is present in Polish culture also in his specific role - as a mediator between artists and politicians. He was also a friend, confidant or correspondent of dozens of people active in the half-century  following the fall of the November Uprising. 

"He could often be seen in the studios of Polish artists in Paris, with a cigarette in his mouth, discussing art, with the enthusiasm and faith of his youth" – such were the typical posthumous recollections.

The proverbial "three handshakes" separated him from the majority of Polish artists of the era. It is impossible to present Norwid's "human cosmos" in this exhibition - It is possible to list a dozen or so people who had the greatest influence on the shape of his life. 

Family relationships and parallels were of great importance to him. As a compensation for early orphanhood? No, rather as a consciousness of being deeply rooted in the legacy of the Polish Commonwealth.

Norwid, though ironic towards the pretensions and haughtiness of the emigrated nobility, himself quite seriously referred to his kinship with King John III Sobieski (their common ancestor was Sebastian Sobieski, who died in 1557!). 

Norwid argued with Teofil Lenartowicz (1822-1893), a poet, ethnographer, and conspirator, about "folklore" and the authenticity of referring to folk roots in poetry. 

Norwid was averse to Lenartowicz's ostentatiously simple lyricism, calling him tartly "Dante playing the pipe". 

And yet, still at the end of his life, they both read and commented on each other's works, Lenartowicz in a dream (carefully recorded) lamenting Norwid's fate. 

While still a high school student, Norwid meets Karol Levittoux (1820-1841) - a student of pedagogical courses, one of a crowd of young men plotting against the tsar.

Levittoux - arrested and tortured, fearing to betray his colleagues - decided to inflict his own death by arson, becoming one of the figures of the Polish Romantic imagination. "He was found on his knees with his chest and face charred," Norwid wrote of him.

Norwid's greatest love was Maria Kalergis - a countess, cosmopolitan of Polish-Russian descent, patron of the arts, and also a person with a very complex personal and family situation. 

Norwid most likely met Kalergis in December 1845. He accompanied her on her travels through Italy, visited her in many European cities, and remained associated with her (and present in the circle of her salon) for several years to come. 

At the beginning of 1848, Norwid met the first of the three Polish Romantic poets, recognized by tradition as "The Bards": Zygmunt Krasiński (1812-1859), a pessimistic aristocrat. 

Krasiński was enamored of the young Norwid, writing of "fire in an alabaster vessel". Both were distancing themselves from the populism, and both declared an almost ultramontane attachment to the Church. 

In later years, however, Krasiński treated Norwid with distance and despise.