Kraków,
among a number of other civic identities, is a university town, long a place of
culture and learning. The Jagiełłonian University, founded in 1364 by Kazimierz
III (The Great), the last of the Piast dynasty, and then re-endowed by the first of the Jagiełłons at
the turn of that century, was the first university in Poland and
remains—according to my sources—the pre-eminent one in the country, though the
University of Warsaw, I suspect, would beg to differ. The list of distinguished
alumni is long and illustrious, including Copernicus, Jan Kochanowski, the
first of a very long line of extraordinary Polish poets, and Jan III Sobieski,
the Savior of Europe and, reputedly, a pretty compelling letter writer.
The academic, the intellectual enterprise, truly a form of heroism here, is regularly
cast in bronze, not perhaps on every block, but you needn’t walk far to find a
statue, bust, relief, or plaque. Attached herewith are but a few monuments to the life of
the mind: to medieval students, a
Renaissance astronomer (Copernicus), and a modern medical light and university
rector (Józef Dietl).
The most notorious and interesting possible alumnus—or possibly alumni—is Dr. Faust/Faustus, yes that Faust, who sold his soul to the Devil, depending on whom you read, in exchange for the knowledge of advanced magic, universal techné, or transcendental wisdom. (And we, these days, complain about the cost of tuition.) At any rate, Faust, or the person(s) who prefigured Faust, is alleged to have studied here in Kraków, though I haven’t discovered the Jagiełłonians talking him up anywhere. Here he is identified as Pan Twardowski, a 16th-century nobleman from the local countryside whose natural sense of inquiry, corrupted by Satan, leads to a life in the city, an urban life of questionable romance, ambition, wealth, power, and disaster—with, mercifully, deliverance from his bargain by divine intervention (Mary, Mother of God). While in transit to Hell, he’s saved, released, falling from Satan’s clutches onto the moon, into a kind of eternal lunar limbo. The man in the moon is, thus, a Pole. (See lower right, notice moustache.)
Scholars
like to conflate source material, but I prefer to imagine that Faust and
Twardowski were actually two different people, two dangerously willing students
of the ultimate—how many more were there back in those days—who might actually
have met on the streets of Kraków, at the southeast corner of the rynek, where my guidebook says Pan
Twardowski took rooms. Imagine the conversation, the comparison of notes. Two
doors up is a bookstore with shelves and shelves of books on Poland in Polish
by Poles. I was there this week, sighing. My project is not anywhere close to
universal knowledge, but if Satan actually showed up to seal a deal, I’d
seriously consider it—and, given the state of my soul, think I was getting
the better end of the deal. I might even settle for a grasp of the grammar and full
vocabulary. But then, if Satan actually showed up, his presence would imply a
more conventional Otherworld than I’ve been wont to suppose. Requiring the
re-evaluation, then, of an under-valued soul, or its prospects. You think about these things when you're wandering about in Kraków. Later, on that
particular walk, I found myself in the Carmelite brothers’ church on my own
home street, Karmelicka, lighting a candle and dropping a złoty—two actually, one for myself and one for a fellow
scholar-vagabond—into the box of the St. Jude’s altar. A cheaper, slower, less
hazardous form of miracle-making.
Below is
a picture of the Master's digs. The elevated statue on the corner is not Pan Jan T, but an Italian saint; Twardowski's
dubious methods are not memorialized in stone or bronze.
Here also is a link to a movie, 1936, http://www.veoh.com/watch/v17368023MR8CKpPZ, a nice version of his quest for knowledge. It’s in Polish,
but like so many things in life, though we don’t have the language, we can watch
and get the gist of the story.
