Stanislaw Brzozowski (writer)

Biography

Leopold Stanislaw Leon Brzozowski was born in 1878 in Maziarnia, a village near Chelm. Despite the ordinary background of his family (impoverished gentry), he attended private schools, which allowed him to apply for admission to the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the University of Warsaw in 1896. In 1897 Brzozowski was involved in student riots against Russian professors teaching at the university. As the consequence of the riots, many of the students (including Brzozowski) were expelled from the university for a period of one year. At that time Brzozowski was the chief of the student organization 'Bratniak', designed to maintain financial support for the expelled students. In order to help his father, who suffered from a fatal illness, Brzozowski decided to use organization's funds. Although he had promised himself to give the money back as soon as possible, his embezzlement was discovered. The arbitration panel of the fellow members excluded Brzozowski from the activities of the organization for three years. In the same year (1898) he was imprisoned as the result of the investigations into the secret activities of the Society for People's Education.

Beginning in the autumn of 1898 Brzozowski suffered heavily from tuberculosis, a consequence of the time spent in prison. In order to recuperate, he decided to go to the sanatorium in Otwock. There he met, in 1900, Antonina Kolberg, and they married the next year. In 1903 his only child, Anna Irena, was born. Brzozowski's health problems accompanied him for the rest of his life. In 1905 he went for the first time to Nevi, Italy to receive more intensive medical care. In 1906 he went to Italy again and resided in Florence until his death in 1911. The last few years of his life, although spent in gradually weakening conditions, both material and health-related, were the most productive period of his life. Brzozowski then wrote his opus magnum – the novel Plomienie [Flames] – a response to Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, as well as important books concerning his philosophical and cultural program: Idee. Wstep do filozofii dojrzalosci dziejowej. (Ideas. An introduction to the Historical Maturity) and Legenda Mlodej Polski (The Legend of Young Poland).

Intellectual profile

Brzozowski was an influential critic of Polish social and philosophical thought, an analyst of literature, and a piercing observer of Polish and European everyday life. He was an unambiguous critic of the traditionalism and provincialism of the main currents of Polish 19th century literature. In particular, Brzozowski was a strong opponent of historical novels, represented mainly by the Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz. Brzozowski's radical attacks on Sienkiewicz's works made him persona non grata in the Polish artistic mainstream.

Brzozowski held a unique position as an astute critic of Polish contemporary culture, known as Young Poland (Polish modernism) or neoromanticism. His Legenda Mlodej Polski represents the most comprehensive denunciation of those forms of the Polish mind, which, in Brzozowski's words, represent "the delusion of cultural consciousness."

Connection of Marxism and Catholicism

As for his philosophical heritage, Brzozowski tended to experience quite radical shifts in his world-view as the result of subsequent readings. His first important philosophical inspiration was Friedrich Nietzsche and his notion of historical sense, which Brzozowski found particularly valuable. After focusing on Nietzsche, Brzozowski moved closer towards Kant which eventually enabled him to develop his philosophy on the Marxist basis. Besides having many vital inspirations, Marxism played the central role in his intellectual biography and for the longest period of his short life, he was a Marxist thinker. His interpretation of Karl Marx's thought was anti-naturalist and anti-positivist. Brzozowski was an ardent critic of Friedrich Engels and his role in developing Marxist thought. He accused Engels of 'vulgar determinism' and leading Marxism towards naive and reductionist perspective of 'economic necessity'. Finally, he developed his own philosophical program called 'philosophy of labour' that emphasized the role of human activity in creating and re-creating the reality. This was a concept rejecting reification and alienation of human acts and, according to Brzozowski, was the natural expansion of key Marxist ideas.

In his philosophoy Brzozowski focused on subjective factors of work: on the quality of human will and on cohesion and strength of the live social bond determining this quality. He thought that the examination of work from the perspective of experience acquired in the process of its performance, or its "internal" analysis, made it possible to prove that the ultimate basis of work and its products arising in human awareness as the "objectively" given world, was subjective physical effort, maintained by the strength of human will. This effort, in its appropriate level and progress, depends on other forms of labor, creating proper organization and culture of societies; work, its quality, its amount, is a subtle creation of will, maintained by entire cultures, which in turn is a very subtle and complicated creation.

Brzozowski reaches the conclusion that an essential condition of the discipline of will is a strong, traditional moral bond. This results in recognizing religion as a valuable school of will and a precious element of intense social bond. The essence of work is therefore the inner life of a human being, spirituality, “willingness to work”, although strongly rooted in customs, in culture. This emphasis on roots indicates that community is of crucial importance for the continuity of work.

Contemporary significance in Poland

Stanislaw Brzozowski has an established position as one of the most important intellectuals in modern Polish history. His cultural and philosophical activity has been regularly debated throughout the last century in Poland. He became the point of reference for subsequent generations of Polish intellectuals. Although identified mainly with the political left, the subtlety and open-endedness of his thought allowed some groups from the right to identify themselves with Brzozowski's ideas as well.

Since 2002, Brzozowski has been the patron of Krytyka Polityczna, a Polish left-wing intellectual society organized around a journal of the same title founded by Slawomir Sierakowski in 2002. In 2005, the Stanislaw Brzozowski Association was founded and began to publish a journal. The association's core idea resembles that of its patron: that intellectuals are public figures who ought to live a socially involved and committed life.

Main works