Young Poland movement

▪ Polish literary group

      diverse group of early 20th-century Neoromantic writers brought together in reaction against naturalism and Positivism. Inspired by Polish Romantic (Romanticism) writers and also by contemporary western European trends such as Symbolism (Symbolist movement), they sought to revive the unfettered expression of feeling and imagination in Polish literature and to extend this reawakening to all the Polish arts. Centred in Kraków, the movement was pioneered by the poet Antoni Lange (Lange, Antoni) and by the editor and critic Zenon Przesmycki (“Miriam”), an early Polish modernist.

      The most prominent figure of the Young Poland movement was the painter and dramatist Stanisław Wyspiański (Wyspiański, Stanisław), whose play Wesele (1901; The Wedding, filmed 1973), a masterpiece of evocative allusion, is written in the stylized verse of the traditional puppet theatre. Other Young Poland movement writers included the peasant poet Jan Kasprowicz (Kasprowicz, Jan), who established a tonic poetic metre that became the characteristic rhythm of modern Polish poetry, and the novelists Stefan Żeromski (Żeromski, Stefan), Władysław Stanisław Reymont (Reymont, Władysław Stanisław), and Karol Irzykowski (Irzykowski, Karol).

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