Keywords
“Spirit-King”
Armenia
Armenian
Zarathustrianism
Zoroaster
Romantic memory
Iranian thesis
How to Cite
Abstract
The subject matter of the study is the Armenian theme woven into "The Spirit-King", which is linked both to Juliusz Slowacki’s biography and the main hero of his epos – Hera Armenian. The findings of contemporary Armeniologists and Iraniologists irrefutably show the Armenian basis of the myth of Hera, the son of Armenios, quoted by Plato in his 10th book of The Republic (Politeia) and artistically transformed in Slowacki’s work (contrary to the assumptions by Polish literary scholars who considered Hera’s Armenianness to be a mistake made by the French translators of The Republic).The myth’s source lies in the Armenian story of Ara the Beautiful, slightly modified under the influence of Persian (Iranian) culture and religious tradition, particularly that of Zoroastrianism. The figure of Hera-Zarathustra evokes the Romantic concepts of the Iranian ethnogenesis of Slavs in Slowacki’s Slavonic epic. The context of the “Iranian thesis” allows us to regard "The Spirit-King" not only as a monument of Latin civilization or a reservoir of Scandinavian mythology, but also as a Romantic gate to the Orient, revealing (thanks to Plato) the forgotten tangled web of Slavonic, Iranian and Armenian prehistory. The Romantic “discernment of one’s nature” in Slowacki’s work happens through the exploration of the deepest layers of the collective memory of the Indo-Europeans (particularly Slavs) and (possibly) by searching one’s own oriental roots. In this sense, "The Spirit-King" becomes a record of a Romantic “memory of the heart”.
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