• 1 In a footnote to an article on the album Umarli żywi [The dead living] by Teofil Lenartowicz, Arkad (...)
• 2 On the title page of the ‘Book of Memorabilia’, recorded in the catalogue as ‘Memorial book’, page (...)
• 3 Doctor Dieffenbach, a famous surgeon, brought about the transfer of Norwid to the prison clinic. Mr (...)
• 4 C. Norwid, [Book of Memorabilia], p. 44.

1Among the archivalia we inherited from Zenon Przesmycki-Miriam, the so-called ‘Book of Memorabilia’ by Cyprian Norwid1 was luckily preserved. In it, a handful of artefacts survived, such as letters received by the writer (and artist), tickets, an excerpt from a ship boarding pass from a journey to America, and photographic portraits of acquaintances. This ‘Book of Memorabilia’ also contains a page with three dried leaves and the following note: ‘Leaving prison 1846’ [‘Wychodząc z więzienia 1846’].2 This floristic-verbal composition is one of four elements placed on page 44: above it, there is a fragment from a Polish-Rusyn calendar, next to it a small watercolour portrait of doctor Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach, and then the leaves: a pasted-in piece of paper with a handwritten signature of ‘Pani Horn’ [Mrs Horn]. Both of the aforementioned individuals supported Norwid when he was in prison.3 Here, the former inmate also gave a ‘grateful’ mention to ‘the unknown woman’, who would walk the gardens and whom he most likely spotted from the window of the prison clinic.4

• 5 Norwid turned up at the secretary of the Russian embassy in Berlin after 10 June 1846, his arrest t (...)

2Researchers would refer to the ‘memorabilia’ from the summer of 1846, establishing the chain of events associated with the Berlin prison episode of Norwid, when he was first summoned to the Russian embassy in Berlin and then arrested shortly afterwards and subsequently placed at Hausvogtei.5 Thanks to the persistent endeavours of friends and acquaintances, he was released on 27 July of the same year, but, at his request, he stayed a few more days in the prison hospital. It is not known precisely when Norwid left the hospital. We do know, however, that upon leaving, he was collecting leaves. I believe this small detail deserves a moment of attention.

• 6 The reviewer of the Kalendarz…, Bogdan Burdziej, stated that the issue of Norwid’s imprisonment has (...)
• 7 In Greek antiquity, even in the Iliad, the human condition subjected to the tyranny of time was com (...)
• 8 Sad poems and leaves from the body of poetic work of Stefan Garczyński, Teofil Lenartowicz and Adam (...)
• 9 On the romantic culture of the album of friendship, see: J. Beinek, “‘Kamień na smętarzu, karta w i (...)
• 10 Characterising a feuilleton as a genre and literary phenomenon, Norwid used a comparison to the pla (...)

3I will not delve into the chain of biographical events related to the heightened political temperature of the second half of the 1840s.6 I do want to, however, look more closely at the combination of words and leaves, which was testimony to the moment constructed by Norwid, a type or equivalent of a diary entry, which can also be interpreted as a quasi-artistic form, taking into consideration the rather large collection of uses of the ‘leaf’ theme in his pieces. Moreover, the aforementioned theme has a long tradition in literature and art,7 and, in no small part, it co-creates the nineteenth-century imaginarium.8 A yellowed, autumnal leaf would fall in many an elegy of the time. Leaves would be put into albums of friendship, books, and picture frames.9 A new genre gained incredible popularity: a feuilleton, or feature article, taking its name from the French feuille, meaning both a leaf and a page.10 Norwid’s post-imprisonment leaves can, therefore, be included in the rich assortment of images and cultural micro-practices. At the same time, their tangible, ephemeral materiality (paradoxically transfixed in time!) begs the question of authorial intent, of the relationship with a situation that is specific, unique, and irrefutable in its factuality.

• 11 J. Lotman, Autokomunikacja: „JA” i „INNY” jako adresaci. (O dwóch modelach komunikacji w systemie k (...)

5As the page with this floristic-verbal artefact is included in a collection of miscellanies known as ‘Book of Memorabilia’, it is hard to resist the impulse to interpret it as an act of remembering an important biographical moment. I believe, however, that this imposing categorisation eclipses the autocommunication intention, which takes precedence over remembrance. It would seem that a formula used by Juri Lotman, who at one point discussed this category in reference to types of culture, is at play here. In autocommunication, when the sender is simultaneously the receiver of the message, it is all about clarifying the inner state of the person writing in order to experience one’s own individuality, in the need for self-knowing or auto-therapy…11 According to the semiotics scholar, in a message of this kind, a tendency manifests itself by which to reduce words and replace them with symbols that are beyond the verbal; after all, the sender communicates and records content that is known to them.

• 12 C. Norwid, “Do mego brata Ludwika” [To my brother Ludwik], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 1 (first (...)

7Let us look at the writings of Norwid before 1846 to search for literary antecedence of the leafy message, that is, stylistic figures utilising leaves. One must say up front that there are not many of those. They sometimes appear as an element of a Spring or Autumn landscape, sometimes as part of a simile. The poet highlights their colour palette and other characteristics perceived with the senses: the springtime leaves are green, fresh, and the autumnal ones are yellow, dry, rustling, or even rotten, putrid. Already in his youth poems, there is a split in the poet’s imaginarium: although he mainly writes in an atmospheric way about leaves as creations of nature, the culturally marked ‘bay’ also appears. I will revisit it later. In the poems from the first half of the 1840s, written in Italy, there also appear single leaves evoking the inner state of the subject. In Do mego brata Ludwika [To my brother Ludwik], the poet confides in his brother about his resigned disposition: ‘For I lost the habit of trusting in happiness, / As with faith in Autumn, this emblem of midnight, / I look upon every little leaf…’ [‘Bo odwyknąłem w szczęście mieć ufności, / Bo z wiarą w jesień, tym północy godłem, / Na każdy listek patrzę…‘].12 In another, incomplete poem, composed most likely in 1844, a belief in one’s unlimited abilities sits next to powerlessness:

• 13 Idem, “[Tu Kolumbowe miałem stanowisko]” [Here, I had a Columbus stance], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie(...)

• 14 Idem, Dzieła wszystkie [Complete works], vol. 10, ed. J. Rudnicka (Lublin: 2008), p. 159.

• 15 Idem, „Pompeja” [Pompeii], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 3, p. 20.
• 16 Idem, “Kleopatra i Cezar” [Cleopatra and Caesar], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 5, p. 64.

11Let us pause for another moment at the gathering of leaves. In literary pieces, one will also find at least several such gestures. In the previously cited Wspomnienie wioski [Memory of the village], a nightingale ‘happily picks at leaves of fragrant jasmine’. In Pompeja [Pompeii] from 1847 or 1848, a tourist visiting the city dug out from volcanic ash, upon meeting the spirits of two of its former inhabitants, ‘picks at a leaf’ [‘skubie liść’] in embarrassment, like a ‘girl playing “he loves me – he loves me not”’ [‘dziewczę, które z sobą gra w stokrotkę’]. Still ‘picking at a leaf’, he musters the courage to ask one of the ‘shadows’: ‘I would be happy to know, / Who I am so lucky to sit with here and speak to?’ [‘rad bym wiedzieć, / Z kim szczęście mam zamieniać słowo i tu siedzieć?’].15 In a different poem from the Italian period, the poet advises the female addressee to ‘play green’ with a leaf collected at a cemetery. In the later tragedy, Kleopatra i Cezar [Cleopatra and Caesar], the queen of Egypt, saying farewell to Caesar, ‘picks at a rose’, and then gifts the ruler of Rome ‘a leaf’: ‘take then also [apart from the lion – E. D.-P.] this rose leaf… / At once an image of strength and weakness / Let them remind you of Egypt…’ [‘weź także [prócz lwa – E. D.-P.] i ten róży listek… / Siły obraz i obraz słabości zarazem / Niech ci przypomną Egipt…’].16

• 17 J.I. Kraszewski, Kartki z podróży [Letters from travels], vol. 2, footnotes and afterword by P. Her (...)

13In the ‘Book of Memorabilia’ by Norwid, two more plant trinkets have been preserved: a stem and a single leaf, with no verbal additions. Only the author himself knew what they meant to him. Leaves, according to testimony by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, were also part of the décor of Norwid’s office, which the writer visited in the Summer of 1858 while the poet was away. Kraszewski was intrigued particularly by the cross made by Norwid, with marks of wounds of the crucified replacing the figure of Christ. He also noted other elements of the interior design, which highlighted its private character: ‘from his album of drawings, the artist puts some memory, on which he wants to feast, in a frame hanging opposite the bed, and leaves it for several weeks, sometimes longer, until he fancies a change. In different frames: some dried-up leaves, remnants of some life’ [‘ze swego albumu rysunków artysta wkłada w ramy wiszące naprzeciw łóżka wspomnienie jakieś, którym chce się karmić, i zostawia go kilka tygodni, czasami dłużej, dopóki fantazja nie przyjdzie odmienić. W innych ramkach zeschłe liście, szczątki jakiegoś życia’].17 The original form of a crucifix begs the viewer’s reflection, and the ‘dried-up leaves’ defy interpretation. Kraszewski was left with nothing else but to see within them a conventional sign of a melancholy mood or disposition. The autocommunicative sense eluded the beholder.

• 18 C. Norwid, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 9, p. 23.

• 19 [Listy i wiersze Cypriana Norwida] [Letters and poems of Cyprian Norwid], National Library of Polan (...)
• 20 Torquato Tasso is depicted in a wreath in, among others, a lithograph by Jan Feliks Piwarski, a cop (...)
• 21 L. Siemieński, “Laur i laureaci” [Laurel and laureates], in: idem, Dzieła [Works], vol. 1: Varia z (...)

16Apart from leaves in the ‘Book of Memorabilia’ in Przesmycki’s archives, one other item survived (which, again, is hard to believe): a leaf, which Norwid gifted to Jadwiga Łuszczewska-Diotima, labelled a ‘leaf from the wreath of Tasso’ [‘liść z lauru Tassa’].19 This phrase suggests that it is about a laurel from the poet’s wreath, regardless of its questionable origin. Torquato Tasso would be depicted with a laurel wreath on his brow,20 though, harassed by his enemies and afflicted with psychiatric disorders in his life, he never received the honour of being crowned on the Capitoline Hill, as it was practiced in the Renaissance. As described by Lucjan Siemieński, everything was prepared for the poet’s triumph, but death stood in the way of completing the act of crowning with laurels. The wreath prepared for the ceremony was laid on the grave of the deceased.21

• 22 In the poem Italiam! Italiam!, the landscape in which Tasso wrote Jerusalem Delivered, was associat (...)
• 23 See: Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. N.J. Watson (Basingstoke: 2009).
• 24 Tasso’s oak is the topic of a watercolour by Harry Johnson from the second half of the nineteenth c (...)
• 25 On visiting San Onofrio, see: Kalendarz życia i twórczości Cypriana Norwida, vol. 1, p. 267. Earlie (...)

17Norwid sent the letter to the Warsaw ‘bardess’, likely referring to this belated and unfinished ceremony.22 It does not seem, however, that it could originate from the wreath kept in the San Onofrio monastery, where the author of Jerusalem Delivered spent the final years of his life and where he died. It is hard to suspect the giver of this kind of vandalism. The floristic present, however, is a memento of a visit to this place on 16 July 1847, as the inscription written directly on the leaf blade attests. Norwid probably collected it, following in the footsteps of other tourists, curious about the places linked to the biographies of famous personages.23 These keepsakes were provided by the so-called tree of Tasso. That, however, was an oak,24 not a laurel tree, and the leaf mailed to Diotima is undoubtedly a laurel leaf.25

• 26 L. Siemieński, “Na liść z wieńca Tassa. Przysłany z Rzymu” [On the leaf from Tasso’s wreath. Sent f (...)
• 27 J.W. Gomulicki, “Norwid a Tasso” [Norwid and Tasso], in: Kwartalnik Neofilologiczny [Neophilologica (...)
• 28 L. Siemieński, “Do Teofila Lenartowicza bawiącego w Rzymie” [To Teofil Lenartowicz sojourning in Ro (...)
• 29 Lenartowicz mentioned an oak, underneath which Tasso would sit with Saint Philip, as well as the wr (...)

18An analogous memento gave Siemieński inspiration for the poem Na liść z wieńca Tassa. Przysłany z Rzymu [On the leaf from Tasso’s wreath. Sent from Rome]. The author writes that it was ‘a leaf picked at San Onofrio from Torquato’s wreath’ (from the wreath, not the monastery tree), albeit seeing the laurel as a ‘bloody thorn, / Which turned into bay, entwines the bard’s temple / As a shroud envelops him with the rags of fame’ [‘cierń krwawy, / Co się w wawrzyn przerzucił, skroń wieszcza oplata / Gdy go całun powija pieluchami sławy’].26 Juliusz Wiktor Gomulicki hypothesised that the leaf was sent to Siemieński by Norwid.27 There is no date under the poem Na liść z wieńca Tassa, published in the volume of Poezje [Poems] in 1863, and then in Dzieła [Works] in 1882. In Poezje, it sits next to the poem Do Teofila Lenartowicza bawiącego w Rzymie [To Teofil Lenartowicz sojourning in Rome], which suggests that the former poem is also linked with Lenartowicz.28 The poet, who came to Rome in 1855, also visited San Onofrio, which he later documented in a letter (or minor long poem), Torquatowi Tasso na San Onofrio [To Torquato Tasso at San Onofrio], included in Album włoski [Italian album] from 1870.29 Despite circumstances that could point to Lenartowicz, it seems highly probable that it was Norwid who sent Siemieński the leaf. Albeit, not necessarily in 1856, which Gomulicki leaned towards, as did the authors of Kalendarz życia i twórczości Cypriana Norwida [A diary of life and work of Cyprian Norwid] (in a poem from that year, Duch Adama i skandal [Spirit of Adam and scandal], one can find a simile of a laurel and a thorn). Another date also cannot be completely ruled out – a date from the end of the 1840s. Siemieński was, after all, the recipient of Norwid’s Zarysy z Rzymu [Sketches from Rome], written in 1848. The courtly suffering of Tasso, displayed in the work by Siemieński, resonates with the revolutionary, anti-feudal atmosphere of the late 1840s. It is impossible to guess what comment accompanied the leafy parcel from Rome. However, it probably did not contain a comparison of a laurel leaf to a thorn, if it put the poem’s author in a polemical mood: ‘This is not a leaf, but a bloody thorn’ [‘To nie liść, a jedno cierń krwawy’].

• 30 C. Norwid, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 8, p. 243. Wreath as an attribute of improvisational performances (...)
• 31 Antoni Waga (1799–1890) – Polish naturalist, traveler, writer and educator, teacher of Norwid (edit (...)
• 32 C. Norwid, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 8, p. 243.

19As to when Diotima received the leaf gifted to her, we also cannot be sure. It would seem to correspond with the letter to her mother, Magdalena Łuszczewska, dated 1855, in which the author refers to Diotima’s improvisational performances, clad in a wreath and ‘appropriate dress’: ‘not everyone is allowed to be a poet without a wreath and toga, or rather (which is especially true here): NOT ALL TIMES AND SOCIETIES ALLOW ONE TO BE A POET WITHOUT A WREATH AND A TOGA’ [‘nie każdemu wolno być poetą bez wieńca i togi, albo raczej (co tu jest szczególnie prawdziwym): NIE W KAŻDYM CZASIE I SPOŁECZEŃSTWIE WOLNO JEST BYĆ POETĄ BEZ WIEŃCA I TOGI’].30 A theatrical costume was used to distance one from the audience and thus to offer protection from unsympathetic critics. The author of the letter closed his epistolary argument with a humorous punchline: ‘Romans believed – that lightning does not strike a laurel tree – I do not know, whether lighting does not indeed strike a laurel, and in truth I doubt that, but the fact that laurel fragrance does deter repugnant insects is a thing even Professor Waga31 will not deny’ [‘Rzymianie wierzyli – że piorun w drzewo laurowe nie uderza – nie wiem, czy piorun, owszem, wątpię nawet, ale że woń laurowa wstrętne oddala owady, to rzecz, której i Pan Waga nie zaprzeczy’].32 Did the ‘leaf from Tasso’s wreath’ constitute the second punchline: a sign of approval for the ‘pomp’ of the poetess? A leaf to her theatrical wreath? A leaf from the real (if not quite) wreath of a real poet?

• 33 Olaf Krysowski wrote on the epistolary-poetic relations of Norwid and Diotima (idem, “Deotyma – ‘Dz (...)
• 34 Po ziarnie [Grain by grain] was to support, materially and morally, Walerian Tomaszewicz, writer an (...)
• 35 “List Deotymy do Cypriana Norwida” [Letter from Diotima to Cyprian Norwid], in: Po ziarnie. Zbiorek (...)

20The leaf sent to Diotima weaves itself into the exchange of correspondence and poems between Norwid and the Warsaw poet (or, with Magdalena Łuszczewska) from the 1850s and the early 1860s.33 First, the poet addressed the poem Rzeczywistość i marzenia (!) [Reality and dreams (!)], from America (1854) to Jadwiga. Then, there was the aforementioned 1855 letter, and she, on the other hand, replied by letter and poem (1857). He then reacted to this reaction with a letter (1858) and two poems. Their correspondence gained a public dimension when Diotima provided her letter to the initiators of the ‘commemorative collection’ Po ziarnie [Grain by grain], published in 1861,34 attaching Norwid’s poem Odpowiedź [Reply], a slightly later work than Deotymie. Odpowiedź [To Diotima. A reply]. She also mentioned the illustration element of this exchange: ‘Shortly afterwards I received the most pretty drawing, sketched by a masterful hand and enveloped with evangelical breath’.35

• 36 C. Norwid, “[Klaskaniem mając obrzękłe prawice]” [Their hands swollen from clapping], in: idem, Pis (...)

21The ‘laurel’ leaf with an inscription pointing to the year 1847, when Norwid made it his property and kept it for nearly a decade among his humble belongings, despite changes of address, including a journey across the Ocean, was transformed, however, through the act of gifting. In its original form, it was not a typical souvenir of a tourist; it had an autocommunicative meaning: musing on a leaf, Norwid regarded himself in the tragic fate of Tasso. He was asking about his own fate. Although the poet later wrote in a poem beginning with an incipit [Klaskaniem mając obrzękłe prawice] [(Their hands swollen from clapping)], that he took ‘no single leaf, nor its tiniest tooth’ [‘listka jednego, ni ząbeczka w liściu’]36 from the ‘laurels’ of ‘giants’ (transl. by D. Borchardt, New York: 2011), his predecessors in poetry, the leaf of Tasso, which he adopted, could still play a role in verbalising this metaphorical refusal to inherit (even if unconscious, or not made conscious straight away). The laurel leaf gifted to Diotima meant something else now: it corresponded with the epistolary and poetic variants of the theme. It resonated with, among others, a fragment of a ‘reply’ to the poem, in which the female poet revered Norwid as ‘bard-sculptor-painter’, likening him to Michelangelo Buonarroti. The addressee reacted to this ill-timed ‘crowning’ with a rhetorically exaggerated and ‘insincere’ concern:

• 37 Idem, “Deotymie. Odpowiedź” [To Diotima. A reply], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 1, p. 288 (empha (...)

• 38 C. Norwid, “Odpowiedź” [Reply], in: Po ziarnie, p. 128.

23In the poem printed in the ‘commemorative collection’, Norwid again refused to take the laurels from the poetess: ‘And all that I draft or make from bronze today, / Is but like a nail hammered into a wall / By a prisoner – someone else has the laurel and a hope / I – but one honour – being a man’ [‘A dziś co kreślę albo z brązu leję, / To tylko jak w murze ćwiekiem / Więzień – kto inny ma laur i nadzieję / Ja – jeden zaszczyt – być człekiem’].38 The comparison to a prisoner could also refer to Tasso’s biography as a distant backdrop.

• 39 Idem, “Marzenie” [Dream], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 1, p. 23.

25Bay or laurel leaves that crown one ironically appear more frequently in Norwid’s works. In his early poems, the ‘desire’ for them is strongly off-putting (Marzenie [Dream]).39 It is not a worthy motivation for either actions (Dumanie [Musing]) or works (Adam Kraft). In his letters, Norwid writes with disdain about the ‘crowned’ writers who enjoy popularity. ‘Mature’, overly grown bay trees from the aforementioned poem [Klaskaniem mając obrzękłe prawice] [Their hands swollen with clapping], deplete native soil.

• 40 Idem, “Wspomnienie wioski” [Memory of a village], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 1, p. 13.
• 41 Idem, “Tyrtej. Za Kulisami” [Tyrtej. Behind the scenes], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 4, p. 495.
• 42 Ibidem.

26But different works are possible. The ‘village nightingale’, gęślarz [lute] in Wspomnienie wioski [Memory of the village], does not sing for applause: to it, ‘every leaf is a bay leaf’ [‘liść każdy jest liściem wawrzynu’].40 We find an unusual example of the laurel theme in Tyrtej. The eponymous character is crowned by accident, in a way by nature itself: he gets entangled in laurel bushes. Eginea is telling her visually impaired husband what has happened: ‘There is no more path beyond… I allowed you to walk as per the impulse that carried you, and here you have your whole forehead entwined in laurel branches’ [‘Ścieżki już nie ma dalej… pozwoliłam ci kroczyć na wolę niosącego cię zapędu, aż oto uwikłałeś całe czoło w gałęzie lauru’].41 She draws a more general observation from this small occurrence: ‘Indeed, the grand poets left a vacancy too great in their wake…’. She speaks this thought while ‘removing his [Tyrtej’s – E. D.-P.] hair from the leaf’ [‘odczepiając mu [Tyrtejowi – E. D.-P.] włosy z liścia’],42 which we find out from the stage directions.

• 43 C. Norwid, “Noc tysiączna i druga” [Night one thousand and two], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 4, (...)
• 44 Idem, “W albumie” [In an album], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 1, p. 154.

27In the passage quoted, a laurel is presented with a dual meaning: as a symbol of fame and as a plant in its native environment, in countries of the South. We often come across that second sense in the works of Norwid, who spent several years in his youth in the ‘land interspersed with laurels’ (Italy43), and who then returned there in his memory and imagination. In one of the poems referring to this sojourn, he contrasted the sun and shade of the South with that of foggy North: ‘If only the sunshine, as it does in Sorrento, / Could through the laurel leaves glide in a meandering way: / Bah!... but here, it is all enshrouded in mists’ [‘Żeby to słońca blask, tak jak w Sorrento, / Przez liście lauru się prześlizgał kręto: / Bah!… ale wszystko tu owiane mgłami’] (W albumie [In an album]).44 We can find the shade of broad laurel leaves (and also laurel trees in bloom) in Białe kwiaty [White flowers]:

• 45 Idem, “Białe kwiaty” [White flowers], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 6, p. 192.

• 46 Idem, “Quidam”, in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 3, p. 86.
• 47 Idem, “Próby” [Attempts], in: idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 3, p. 475.
• 48 Idem, “Kleopatra i Cezar”, p. 92.
• 49 In the play Aktor [Actor] we can read as follows:
  ‘Mnie błogo,
  Że rozliczne są sławy, bo równe być mo (...)

28These leaves also cast a shadow in Quidam: ‘Under these laurels, whose broad leaf / Is cut-through with rays of multi-coloured lamps’ [‘Pod tymi laury, których liść szeroki / Lamp różnofarbnych złamały promienie’].46 Elsewhere, we can still read about the ‘wild aroma of laurel’ [‘dzikiej lauru woni’].47 Laurel trees, although common in landscapes of the South, catch one’s attention in Norwid’s works with the intensity of their being, thanks to the perception highlighting the play of light and shadow, heat and chill, the depth of colour (most often red), and dizzying strength of their aroma. In this context, laurel wreaths do not partake in the contrasting of cultural and natural order. In the tragedy Kleopatra i Cezar [Cleopatra and Caesar], the eponymous heroine explains the background of the tradition of wearing wreaths: ‘the village experience instructed / To cool down one’s temples with leaves – and hence the wreaths / During feasts, adopted still today…’ [‘doświadczenie pouczyło gminne / Liśćmi ochładzać skronie – i stąd wieńce poszły / W czas uczt, przyjęte do dziś…’].48 She also asks a doctor about the type of wreath that would soothe a ‘heaviness of a head over-used’ [‘ciężkość głowy nadużytej’]. The response-prescription she gets is that it is bay, though slightly poisonous, ivy, as it is the most cooling, etc. In Southern countries, a laurel wreath has a symbolic meaning that is closely linked with its use, as dictated by the climate. Where the laurel leaf is called ‘bay’ leaf49 – it is completely different: ‘laurels are thorns’ [‘laur to ciernie’].

• 50 Idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 10, p. 135.
• 51 Idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 9, p. 433 (emphasis as per the edition cited). Ivy also adorned Assunta (...)
• 52 Idem, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 9, p. 433 (emphasis as per the edition cited).

30Norwid mentioned other keepsake leaves that had a significance for him when he wrote to Bronisław Zaleski on 29 October 1879: ‘Upon an ivy leaf – added to the first: from the grave of dear departed Zofia – I look, writing’ [‘Na liść bluszczu – dodany do pierwszego: z grobu drogocennej pamięci Zofii – patrząc, piszę’].50 I will focus on the part most clear to me, that is ‘from the grave… of Zofia’ [‘z grobu […] Zofii’], by implication: Zofia Węgierska. She was a friend of both the writer and the addressee of the letter, a hard-working Paris chronicler for Polish magazines (supplement to Czas [Time], Biblioteka Warszawska [Warsaw Library], Gazeta Codzienna [The Daily Newspaper], Kurier Wileński [Vilnius Courier], Bluszcz [Ivy]), who died on 8 November 1869. Therefore, Norwid still remembered her over the years. Not long after Zofia’s death, he pressed Zaleski, who did printmaking, to record on paper the image of her flat at rue Laval 25 and publish it as a wood carving or etching. In the next letter, he praised the small living space of the departed over the drawing rooms of Polish aristocratic women, granting her the awareness of a posthumous existence of national community: ‘One had to be truly a posthumous daughter of the Nation without a public life and with vanishing literature, so as to do, with one branch of ivy picked in a cemetery somewhere and with four walls, that, which no senator’s chamber full of senator’s means can do!’ [‘Trzeba było być prawdziwie że córką pogrobową Narodu bez życia publicznego i z zatracaną literaturą, aby z jednej gałęzi bluszczu urwanego gdzieś na cmentarzu i z czterech murów zrobić to, czego żadna komnata senatorskiego pochodzenia i środków senatorskich pełna uczynić nie umie!’].51 He also prophesised about the destruction of a community which, apart from individual cases, does not understand its condition: ‘Such a community will not live, for just is the hand of Him, for whom there never was and never will be anything tiny and anything grand’ [‘Taka społeczność istnieć nie będzie, albowiem sprawiedliwą jest prawica Tego, dla którego nic maleńkiego i nic wielkiego nigdy nie było ani bywa’].52 If one were to juxtapose the funerary letter (with ivy as a symbol of the afterlife) and the leaf from the grave of Zofia, then there is an apparent closeness of the form of remembering her with the occasional hermeneutics of her drawing room. Norwid was rather alone in his reading of the flat called Sofiówka [Zofia’s place]. Shortly after the death of Węgierska, Leon Kapliński wrote about the lady of the house, and the location itself, in a very different way:

• 53 L. Kapliński, “Zofia Węgierska. Studium literackie” [Zofia Węgierska. A literary study], in: Roczni (...)

• 54 „Listy Zofii Węgierskiej do Cypriana Norwida” [Letters of Zofia Węgierska to Cyprian Norwid], ed. I (...)
• 55 As is evident from the letter to Joanna Kuczyńska, Norwid also kept a fair few plants at his place (...)

32Interestingly, in the surviving letters of Węgierska to Norwid, ivy can be easily overlooked, due to all the many other mentions of plants, mostly flowering types. The small drawing room, which she herself writes about, smells of roses: ‘In Sofiówka there is plenty of sunshine and roses’ [‘W Sofiówce dużo słońca i róż’]; ‘Musing in this way, I took the weight of boredom all the way to Sofiówka. Here, having quickly breathed the smell of roses on the doorstep, I found next to them your pink letter’ [‘Tak dumając aż do Sofiówki niosłam brzemię naleciałych nudów. Tu, zaraz w progu odetchnąwszy wonią róż, obok nich znalazłam Twój różowy bilecik’],54 and Zofia sends Norwid flowers all the time: for example, orange blossom, but also daisy, tuberose and other, unnamed ones, subverting at the same time the social norm according to which it is rather the man who gives presents to the woman.55 Kapliński mentions the botanical passion of Węgierska, inherited from her father:

• 56 L. Kapliński, “Zofia Węgierska…”, p. 220.

• 57 “Listy Zofii Węgierskiej…”, p. 207.

• 58 C. Norwid, Pisma wszystkie, vol. 8, p. 278.

34Judging by the myrtle, this garden must have been in Italy, which Norwid once characterised as a country where ‘there are no other trees, only cypresses, myrtles, olive and laurel’ [‘innych drzew nie ma, jeno cyprysy, mirty, oliwa i laur’].58

• 59 Idem, “Rzecz o wolności słowa” [On freedom of speech], in: idem, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 4, eds. S. (...)

• 60 “Listy Zofii Węgierskiej…”, p. 199.

37Could it have been the visits to Węgierska’s rose-scented drawing room that provoked him, contrarily, to oppose ‘florid’ poetry? He seemed to have resisted the alluring charm of Sofiówka, the femininity of the hostess, intimate atmosphere, so as to promote, contrary to those, the issues vital to the ‘common cause of Rzeczpospolita’. Węgierska did not hold his tirade about the ‘daisy’ against him. She would keenly adopt the role of a pupil in the presence of a master, she even admitted to feeding on his broad erudition, and she wrote about it, referring once again to plant-insect associations: ‘Upon your knowledge I live, like a silkworm on a leaf’ [‘Na twej wiedzy jak jedwabnik na liściu żyję’].60

• 61 C. Norwid, “Rzecz o wolności słowa”, p. 271.

• 62 Idem, “Do obywatela Dmochowskiego – rzeźbiarza” [To citizen Dmochowski – sculptor], in: idem, Pisma (...)

• 63 Herborising, or collecting and drying of plants for educational purposes, was something Jean Jacque (...)

41The leaf-lets picked by Norwid on his way out of prison in 1846, preserved to this day in their physical form (and also available via computer thanks to digitalisation) as well as others, which survived in the ‘Book of Memorabilia’, and additionally, one among Diotima’s epistolaries and the second, which left a mark in the letter to Bronisław Zaleski: I considered these objects worthy of attention and reflection, due to their liminal existence between the orders of nature and culture, between trans-verbal behaviours and their form, and value recorded in the shape of a communication, addressed to oneself or to another person. Gathering leaves, deciding on keeping them as meaningful objects, Norwid acted as an unmistaken product of his age, in which the culture of memento flourished, biographical tourism was undertaken, as well as herborising…63 At the same time, however, he did it for personal reasons and reasons directed at him (or, in his presence) in the first instance, and thus reasons that are hard, and sometimes even impossible, to decode from the outside. Paradoxically, it is precisely the limited readability of the gestures discussed here and the strong opposition to interpretation that seemed to me an epistemically promising starting point for reflection, a reflection that would also encompass the leaf theme in Norwid’s literary work, widely branched out and usually original.

• 64 Leaves became an important emblem of Romanticism, thanks to Dziady cz. IV [Forefather’s Eve pt. 4].(...)

42Small, fragile and separate artefacts from ‘Book of Memorabilia’ allow, as I believe, for a refreshing approach to the Norwid imaginarium, thanks to the ability to cross-over the event-focussed attitude with a tabular one, ordering the verbal resources and artistic devices of the poet. Every leaf begs to be seen within a specific lyrical or fictional situation, and then to be related to the categories of approaches which emerge through the course of reading the writer’s (and artist’s) entire oeuvre. A differentiation clearly comes through of modifier leaf-lets (usually appearing in the plural) and non-modifier ones – singular. Somebody who notices an unnamed ‘leaf-let’, presents oneself as an enthusiast of marginalia, of transient, chance phenomena, prone to be lost or overlooked. ‘Leaf-lets’ defined in terms of genre, of a symbolism fixed in tradition, incorporate the author who uses them into the centuries-old universe of meanings. Thus, in Norwid’s work, there is a co-existence of the leaf theme, a Romantic theme64, so to speak, linked with elusive emotional states of the subject, as well as the classic laurels, ivies, olive branches… In which I see an apparent – and tangible – character of a transitional age.