Słowacki's Poem of Piast Dantyszek, or the macabre despair of a father-land

Starting from some general considerations on the importance of Dante in Juliusz Słowacki's work, the chapter analyses the Poema Piasta Dantyszka herbu Leliwa o piekle, written by the Polish poet in 1838, from the perspective of the macabre link between the behaviour of a desperate father and the idea of father-land. It offers an interpretation of the meanings of his actions and the way they are related in a gruesome specularity to the romantic stereotype of patriotic mothers. In particular, the chapter focuses on the implications arising from the author's choice to demote the eponymous protagonist to the role of a grotesque character, portrayed as a rather obtuse and maybe drunk country nobleman. In a work dense with references to Dante's poem, albeit strongly reworked in an incessant whirlwind of intertextual references, the absence of a guiding role to follow is very significant. Unlike the abandoned project of Posielenije, in which the role played in Dante’s Inferno by Virgil was assigned by Słowacki to Dante himself, Piast Dantyszek is alone in facing the journey to the underworld. Attesting the lack of reassuring models, he himself is an orphan, while the reduction of hell to a tavern farce is the umpteenth bitter and sarcastic provocation of a poet who, having Dante in mind, railed against the misery of his own country and his own times.