1This book is dedicated to Polish national identity – that started to rise in the nineteenth century – and to two of its crucial components, Slavic utopia and the national idea. The bonds between Slavism and Polishness have never been neither obvious nor simple. In this dynamic system, the concept of nation occupied an overriding position – it defined Slavism, marked its boundaries, and at the same time, imposed a certain scheme of its deciphering. The interpretations of the author focus on her main theses that in the nineteenth century, Slavism was utilized for strengthening a sense of nation.

2The title of the book has been taken from the First Act of the drama of Cyprian Norwid, Cleopatra and Caesar, in which the following words are said: “Between the Sphinx and a mummy, the nation is brought up.” The author treats this sentence as the identification of the symbolic condition of Polish Romanticism. On the one hand, we have a riddle regarding Slavic origins, while on the other hand, there is the loss of independence as well as its political and cultural consequences. A Romantic answer to the cruel historical act turned out to be the Slavic-Messianist project, which allowed Poles to decode mummification as hope for resurrection, and in the mysterious Slavic prehistory, it was perceived to legitimize the chosen status of Poles among Slavs and other European nations.

3The crucial points of reference are the studies on the Polish nation by Andrzej Walicki, a Romantic interpretation of Slavdom suggested by Maria Janion, as well as the constructionist concepts of nation – including Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined community,” Eric Hobsbawm’s theory of “invented tradition,” and Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolism. The author, while supplementing the above mentioned contexts with the aspect of gender, passed over in silence by most of the scholars, and by supporting them with postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, and contemporary political philosophy, shows how literature and Romantic journalism “create” and find the nation, and how they contribute to the development of Polish nationalism.

4The basic map for discussion is predicated on Slavdom conceived as spread between, on the one hand, the future, which should come but will not come (Messianism), and on the other hand, the past, which did not occur but continue in collective memory (Slavic utopia). It embraces not only myths, legends, or the spiritual projection of the nation, but also its different kinds of fantasies including geopolitical dreams. In the epoch of Romanticism, various forms of dreams of power appeared. The most persistent among them seems to be, besides Messianism, the “colonial dream of the Eastern borderlands.” In individual chapters, the author analyzes how the Romantic new myths transformed history, applying it to their contemporary needs.

5The publication consists of two parts. The first part, The Slavic Utopia, or Awakening for Dream, contains interpretations of the works of writers and poets created before the November Uprising. Thought focuses on – what is central to Polish identity – the concept of the nation and national narcissism (The Concept of the Nation of Maurycy Mochnacki: Narcissistic Character of the Polish Nation). What would also be crucial is the domestic Romanticists’ dream of empire (The Slavic Empire and Its Hero). The main points of reference for their works were the lost Eastern lands. In the interpretation for these works, meaningful are such categories as country, land, fatherland-nature, and landscape (National Landscapes). Ukraine as an Arcadian fatherland appears in the dissertation from a perspective of postcolonial methodology (A Garden at the Crossroads of Reality and Poetic Imagination: Metamorphosis of Zofiówka). An important issue discussed in this part is the difficult Polish-Ukrainian relations, analyzed in the work through the tools of psychoanalysis and gender studies. What is also remarkable is the symbolic appropriation of Ukrainian folk culture in poetry (A Frail Bond: On the Polish-Ukrainian Unity in the Dumkas of Józef Bohdan Zaleski), and in the translations of Slavic relics (On Translations of Ziewończyk Writers). The experience of closeness and otherness of the two nations – Polish and Ukrainian – bore fruit, i.e. friendship on the one hand, and aversion on the other hand. The analysis of this phenomenon refers to the theory of narcissism of small difference of Sigmund Freud (On Polish-Ukrainian Friendship).

6The second part, The Slavic Atopia, or How to Save Europe, highlights the worldviews of Romanticists promoted in emigration. The lack of fatherland and separation from land released the standpoints and beliefs that are different from those in the country and carrying another understanding of national identity. The majority of the chapters are devoted to the issues of the Romantic creation, producing, or “invention” of the nation (Invention of the Nation in Paris Lectures). An introductory chapter is dedicated to das Unheimliche of Slavism, as well as superior and inferior complexes of Poles (A Torn-Off Bond, or the Figure of A Slave in the Novels of Józef Ignacy Kraszewski). The concept of memory of Paul Ricouer and that of forgetting of Walter Benjamin (Memory and Forgetting in Adam Mickiewicz’s Paris Lectures), Slavic Messianism (“Copernicus in the Moral World”: The Slavic Myth and Messianism in the Writings of Kazimierz Brodziński), and cultural masochism (The Captivated Slavdom), together form the axis of Slavic identity to serve as the basis of a national paradigm. An unusually important context for these issues is cultural geography (Romantic Slavdom on the Maps of Adam Mickiewicz). With the purpose of analyzing the issues more deeply in the second part, the project introduces a perspective based in the developments of psychoanalysis and contemporary political philosophy.