Stanisław Leopold Brzozowski (Polish: ; 28 June 1878 – 30 April 1911) was a Polish philosopher, writer, publicist, literary and theatre critic. Considered to be an important Polish philosopher, Brzozowski is known for his concept of the philosophy of labour, rooted in Marxism. Besides Karl Marx, among his major inspirations were Georges Sorel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Thomas Carlyle, and John Henry Newman. Brzozowski's core idea was based on the concept of a socially engaged intellectual (artist). Although he was in favour of historical materialism, he strongly argued against its deterministic interpretation. In his philosophical approaches, Brzozowski rejected all concepts that were commodifying a human being.
Polish intellectuals (Czesław Miłosz, Andrzej Walicki, Leszek Kołakowski) have stressed that Brzozowski's interpretations of Marx's early writings, not widely known at the time of their formulation, largely anticipated those presented later by György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci.
Life and career
Leopold Stanisław Leon Brzozowski was born in 1878 in Maziarnia, a village near Chełm. He grew up in an impoverished gentry family, but attended private schools, which allowed him to enroll in 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 a consequence, Brzozowski and many other students were expelled from the university for a period of one year. Brzozowski then led the student organization Bratniak, established to maintain financial support for the expelled students. To help his father, who suffered from a fatal illness, Brzozowski decided to use the 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 a result of 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. To recuperate, he went to a sanatorium in Otwock. In 1900 he met there Antonina Kolberg and they married the next year. In 1903 Brzozowski's only child, Anna Irena, was born. The health problems continued, and to receive more intensive medical care, in 1905 he traveled to Italy. In 1906 he went to Italy again and resided in Florence until his death there in 1911. The last few years of Brzozowski's life, although spent in gradually worsening health and material conditions, were the most productive. During that time he wrote his opus magnum – the novel Płomienie (The Flames) – a response to Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as well as important books concerning Brzozowski's philosophical and cultural program: Idee. Wstęp do filozofii dojrzałości dziejowej (Ideas: An introduction to the philosophy of historical maturity) and Legenda Młodej 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 19th century Polish literature. In particular, Brzozowski was a strong opponent of historical novels, such as those written by the Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz. Brzozowski's radical attacks on Sienkiewicz's works made him a persona non grata in Polish artistic circles.
Brzozowski held a unique position as an astute critic of Polish contemporary culture, known as Young Poland (Polish modernism) or neo-romanticism. His Legenda Młodej Polski represents the most comprehensive denunciation of those forms of the Polish mind, which, in Brzozowski's words, represent "the delusion of cultural consciousness."