Michał Wiszniewski (1794-1865), italianista, studioso e traduttore di Dante

: This study focuses on Michał Wiszniewski’s interest in Dante. Wiszniewski was a professor of history and literature at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow and was fond of Italy. This work aims to outline Wiszniewski’s contribution to the Polish reception of Dante in the first decades of the 19 th century. The study recalls Wiszniewski’s three Italian trips and his book, Podróż do Włoch, Sycylii i Malty (A Journey to Italy, Sicily and Malta), which contains numerous mentions of Alighieri. The main part of the study is dedicated to the analysis of his manuscript Dante Alighieri , kept in the Jagiellonian Library (ms. 948 fasc. 7), which has not been carefully examined until now. This manuscript features an outline of a portion of a literature course taught by Wiszniewski in the 1830s, a lesson concerning the life and work of Dante (particularly the Commedia ). The professor describes the two faces of Dante: the scholastic one (in prose) and the poetic one (in verse); explains the poem’s title and the structure of the afterlife; admires the extraordinary plasticity of Dante’s images; and translates into Polish a passage from the Convivio and three episodes from the Inferno . The content of his lesson is compared with other earlier and contemporary Polish studies (of very limited number) on the Poet, as well as with the general trends of Dante criticism of that time and with the Dante scholarship of the Polish Romantic poets. The analysis carried out shows that Wiszniewski’s contribution to Dante studies is, in principle, close to Romantic criticism, but it also follows some Neoclassical trends. In the present study, we do not analyse the article Studia nad Dantem (1847) because of its uncertain attribution (as we try to show).