Los Verhaerena by Tadeusz Miciński: Wartime Manifesto

Abstract

The article is an analysis of an article found in 2017 in the Polish press from the period of World War I (Gazeta Polska; 1917, issue 35) published in Russia, “Los Verhaerena”. The eminent Polish modernist writer Tadeusz Miciński (1878-1918) took up a polemic about the fate of the outstanding Belgian poet Emil Verhaeren (1855-1916), who died in 1916 under the wheels of a train. The Russian writer and anthroposophile Maximilian Voloshin (1878-1932) presented this death as a consequence of Verhaeren’s abandonment of esoteric doctrine and pacifist attitude. Miciński formulated his own writing credo in a polemic with Voloshin’s views, pointing out that the writer’s duty in the face of the cruelty and evil of war is active resistance, which is an injunction against the attacked national community, but also art.