Romanticist wanderer. Stanislaw Brzozowski in the hells of Modernism

During the last century, both work and the complex biography of Stanislaw Brzozowski stirred vehement controversy in Polish culture. Recently, though, the opinion spread that this writer's time had passed. According to the author of the following essay, the converse is true. Maybe it is exactly now when we are gaining an opportunity to liberate Brzozowski from the context of the local ideology, which diminished and distorted his stature.The proper perspective for viewing the discussed philosopher and artist is the European modernism. Thus reconsidered, Brzozowski appears as individuality akin to, say, Martin Heidegger and Georg Lukács, Hermann Broch, James Joyce or Robert Musil, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. His creative life turns into the paradigmatic instance of the leading, artistic, philosophical and political dilemmas of the contemporary intellectual.