Antologie Antoniego Langego i uświatawianie polskiego imaginarium

Abstract

The article interprets Antoni Lange’s set of editorial, translational, and strictly authorial practices as an attempt to make Polish culture more globally relevant. It looks at the tools the author used to modify the reader’s imaginary and asks where Lange’s project fits into the map of Central and Eastern European modernism. Of the more than a dozen volumes of anthologies published by the author of the Miranda between 1894 and 1921, special attention will be paid to the series entitled “Epic. The Most Excellent Epic Poems of All Countries and Nations” and the volume “Eastern Carpet,” since they contain literary works that the editor presents as epitomes of relevant cultures. The analysis of the paratexts Lange used to annotate his anthologies will reveal what is transcultural in his approach and what makes it possible to distinguish his project of Miriam’s “Chimera,” which aimed at Europeanizing Polish culture rather than making it worldly (in the sense inspired by Marko Juvan). An important context for the proposed interpretation is also Franco Moretti’s notion of the modern epic, in which the functions of sacred and epic texts undergo a fusion – close, I believe, to the mechanism set in motion by Lange in Poland at the beginning of the 20th century as he tried to revise the local literary canon.