Better to fall with Alighieri than to triumph with Nogaret : Klaczko's Dante

Julian Klaczko (Jehuda Lejb, 1825-1906) is the only Pole with a specific entry, edited by Mieczysław Brahmer, in the Treccani Enciclopedia Dantesca published in 1970. In 1852 Klaczko published two of his most exciting and original contributions to “Dante's Question” in the Polish review Biblioteka Warszawska. The two essays, The Age of Dante and The Meaning of the Divine Comedy, anticipate many of the themes that almost forty years later will appear in the Florentine Evenings, published in the Revue des deux mondes in 1880 and subsequently translated into Polish (1881) and Italian (1925). In The Meaning of the Divine Comedy, Klaczko makes a long, complex, and reasoned comparison between Divine Comedy's structure and Gothic cathedrals' architecture. Although partially indebted to the works of Johann Christian Metzger and Antoine-Frédric Ozanam, Klaczko’s comparison is a fascinating piece of literary criticism centered on a spatial-rhythmic approach to the structure of both religious buildings and Dante’s masterpiece. The scholar can find the same extremely individualized attitude toward the object of research in the treatment of the main fictional characters of the Florentine Evenings. Such is the case, for instance, of Prince Cantarani. At closer scrutiny, if confronted with his archetype, Prince Michelangelo Caetani, this character reveals an intricate pattern of disguised allusions to contemporary political actuality and Klaczko’s own existential choices.