Ustanawianie Oświecenia

The article is a polemical discussion concerning Piotr Morawski’s book Enlightenment: performances, published as part of a series headed by the Z. Raszewski Theatre Institute. The author of the review is in favor of modifying the perspective proposed by Piotr Morawski in researching and presenting the Enlightenment to today’s reader. According to Marszałek, the time boundaries of the era are treated very narrowly in the book, omitting the first two decades of the nineteenth century, when lawmakers of Enlightenment ideology and the program creators of the first public Polish theater were still struggling not only with Enlightenment ideology and the aesthetics of emancipated townspeople, but also with the romanticism that emerged around 1820, which seems to be a particularly significant omission. Selective presentation of issues and their heterogeneous categorization remove from view many problems that were very important to the Enlightenment, pushed to the background by Piotr Morawski. The contemporary perspective as a criterion for reading, interpreting and criticizing phenomena that took place more than two hundred years ago does not always do justice to era of the Enlightenment, although in many respects it is valuable and instructive for our times.