Stanisław Brzozowski was born on 28th June 1878 in Maziarnia (parish of Wojsławice) near Chełm, to an impoverished noble family – of his father Felix and mother Wanda, née Borowska. He died on 30 April 1911 in Florence.
Brzozowski is best known as the author of Legenda Młodej Polski (The Legend of Young Poland), a book which met with a spectacular response – in terms of both praise and protest. In it, the critic assessed and analysed phenomena contemporary to himself: he derived his own understanding of Romanticism and its relation to Young Poland, asked about the cultural and social conditions of the Polish (and European) situation, and subjected beliefs and attitudes to uncompromising criticism. ‘Brzozowski really did write in such a way as to stimulate extreme reactions – issuing verdicts, crushing criticism, proclaiming unquestionable truths in prophetic inspiration’,assessed Andrzej Mencwel. Of course, Legenda Młodej Polski is not Brzozowski’s only important book. He worked intensively on Idee (Ideas), his philosophical summation, and he ambitiously planned a series of novels, which he did not manage to complete in its entirety. Głosy Wśród Nocy (Voices in the Night) was published posthumously, a collection of excellent texts inspired by, among other things, English literature and thought (many of these inspirations influenced the shape of Pamiętnik (Memoirs), his correspondence).
Stanisław Brzozowski from 'Legenda Młodej Polski: studia o strukturze duszy kulturalnej', Lwów, 1910, photo: Biblioteka Narodowa Polona
Brzozowski began his secondary school education in Lublin and passed his matriculation in Niemirów in Podolia. He studied at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Warsaw. He collaborated with, among other magazines, Przegląd Tygodniowy, Krytyka and Głos, for which he wrote the article My Młodzi (We, The Youth. He also edited Literatura i Sztuka and co-edited Głos Robotniczy.
Much of Brzozowski’s life passed in the shadow of accusations, interrogations and court cases. The first case, conducted by a college court, concerned the theft of money from the coffers of the secret self-help student organisation ‘Brotherly Help’. Brzozowski, who had briefly been president of this organisation at the University of Warsaw (then the Imperial University of Warsaw) and had access to its funds, explained that he took the money as an urgent loan to save his seriously ill father. Nevertheless, the result of the case was a sentence of exclusion from youth organisations and loss of social rights, which he found out about while already in prison. In September 1898, he was arrested on suspicion of working for the secret Society for Popular Education, and spent a month in the 10th Pavilion of the Warsaw Citadel, which had a dramatic effect on his health: he contracted tuberculosis, which was treated in Otwock (from late 1898) and in Zakopane (1905). His stay in Zakopane opened a series of trips: to Italy, Switzerland, Lviv and then Florence.
It is impossible not to mention the most famous part of his biography: the famous Brzozowski case. First, in 1906, a booklet was published containing materials from the investigation of the Society, with interrogation reports incriminating Brzozowski’s colleagues. Already abroad, as a resident of Florence, the critic had to confront the accusation of collaboration with the Okhrana (1908). The list of confidants in the socialist movement provided by Bakaj’s former agent included the name of the author of Legenda Młodej Polski. The list was published in the Kraków-based Naprzod by the editor of this newspaper, Emil Haecker, together with his hostile commentary entitled ‘Spy’. The first hearing of the civic court in Brzozowski’s case took place on 14th February 1909 in Kraków, and another in March of the same year.
The civic court did not decide the Brzozowski case. The pamphlet Lemiesz i Szpada przed Sądem Publicznym, edited by Karol Irzykowski and Ostap Ortwin, was full of words of great persuasion and belief in the absurdity of the accusation – Ortwin’s ‘The presumption of innocence applies here’ – and statements were also contributed by Brzozowski himself. All this, however, was not enough to counterbalance the ‘Spy’ article and Haecker’s pamphlet. The consequences of being accused of collaboration with the Okhrana were two illness-inducing journeys from Florence to Kraków, a sense of injustice and loneliness, and finally personal and financial ruin.
Great support was given to Brzozowski by his wife, Antonina Kolberg, niece of Oskar Kolberg, whom he married in 1901. In the summer of 1903, their daughter Anna Irena was born.
Another important biographical problem is the issue of Brzozowski’s conversion. Maciej Urbanowski writes: ‘Brzozowski finds in the Catholic Church, thanks, among other things, to the help of the writings of another convert, Henry Newman, the most radical guarantee of the meaningfulness and permanence of human work, of each individual manifestation of it’. Of course, this discovery is a controversial point of arrival in the critic’s biography, the result of a long process. The fact of his pre-mortem reception of the sacraments is known only from the accounts of a small number of witnesses. The charismatic Italian nun, Teresa Tarchi-Sarcoli wrote about Brzozowski’s passing, describing his care for loved ones, his confession and viaticum, his prayers and his bravery. What is undeniable is that Brzozowski, towards the end of his short life, discovered something in the Catholic Church that he had once not expected from it: a model of community that does not disregard man’s relationship with history and his place in the world.
The critic recommended that a copy of the Divine Comedy and a photograph of his wife be placed in his grave. He was buried in Florence’s Trespiano Cemetery. ‘A wooden cross with his name and the date of his death was placed on a common grave’, his daughter recalls. In 1928, a monument was unveiled on Brzozowski’s grave with the inscription ‘poeta e filosofo’.
The trouble with Brzozowski
No matter who wrote about Brzozowski – be it Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, Jerzy Giedroyc, Józef Czapski, Andrzej Kijowski, Witold Gombrowicz, Andrzej Walicki, Leszek Kołakowski or Adam Zagajewski – they could not help but take up the problem of engagement with him. The subject of ‘Brzozowski’ has always acted as a catalyst for the burning issues of the present day: from the Young Poland and interwar disputes about the role of the critic, to the discussions of the 21st century. From the perspective of his own experiences and contacts, Czesław Miłosz assesses his fascination with Brzozowski in Człowiek Wśród Skorpionów (A Man among Scorpions). The dialogue and argument with Brzozowski did not boil down to a quarrel with a young man of extraordinary erudition and personality, who set out to remake Polish culture. It was not his diction and stubbornness that earned him a permanent place on the map of modern thought: he would not have been on it if he had not taken up issues of supra-generational importance that are still relevant today.
There remains the matter of evaluating Brzozowski’s oeuvre. He was not a systematic philosopher, which does not deprive his thinking of philosophical stature. He was not exclusively a literary critic, although the book for which he is nevertheless most widely known remains a critical book in many of its parts. He was not a sociologist, but he had an undoubted sociological sense and a passion for social diagnosis. In short, there is no formula that takes into account all the competences of the author of Idee in a satisfying way. Marta Wyka stated: ‘The one closest to the truth was probably Brzozowski himself, calling himself a philosopher of culture’. The critic’s anthropological-philosophical project was made up of the obvious ideological inspirations of the anti-positivist breakthrough, diligent reading, and his own experiences. What is most fascinating, however, is the inquiry into Brzozowski’s irreducibly separate and individual paths of thought.
Brzozowski’s journalism
Andrzej Mencwel summarised the projected aims of Brzozowski’s journalism from 1905 to 1907 as follows:
Everything here is yet to be done, the national substance has to be rebuilt, the culture, the whole tradition has to be rebuilt. Even more – science, philosophy and art.
Writing about the revolution and the tasks of the proletariat is not unrelated to Brzozowski’s philosophising a few years later in his most important ideological and programmatic attempts. The revisions the critic undertakes here concern the issue of democracy, the education of society and the role of the intelligentsia, national stereotypes and civic duties, the current political map and major positions (he dedicated many critical paragraphs to national democracy).
In Białe Ręce (White Hands), Brzozowski opposes the reduction of the tradition of Polish Romanticism to a few ideological choices and a few ideologised monuments . He puts political manifestos and journalistic platitudes to the test. He ironises on such strategies for managing the collective imagination, which openly defy the logic of current events and historical sobriety:
No matter that nails were driven into the heads of Jews in Białystok, and that Dmowski & Co. must content themselves with writing. The social-democratic clock shows that the Kingdom is trailing at the tail end of Russian’s evolution, so although appearances say the opposite, the essence of things must be so. For a fact that is incompatible with theory is merely ideology. A reliable clock does not care about sunrise, but triumphantly chimes noon at sunset (– Opętane Zegary (Possessed Clocks).
In Trąd Wszechpolski (All-Polish Leprosy), he stigmatises ‘noble ignorance’ and such an understanding of the ‘idea of the fatherland’ that absolves one from participation in collective duty, from responsibility for one’s own life and that of others. He takes a stand with his writing against Sienkiewicz and his contemporary critics. In several articles, he clarifies his attitude to Marx and Marxism, approving of many of the insights of the German thinker, while referring with reserve to many of the proposals of Marxist ideologues
The two most important books?
Researchers of Brzozowski’s legacy usually consider Idee (Ideas) or Legenda Młodej Polski (The Legend of Young Poland) to be his most important books. Andrzej Walicki wrote that the latter ‘is supported by the reception of Brzozowski’s thought to date, while Idee is supported by the genre weight of the philosophy it contains’. It is not possible to create a simple ranking that omits Głosy Wśród Nocy (Voices in the Night), Pamiętnik (Memoirs) and Sam Wśród Ludzi (Alone Among Men).
‘The Legend of Young Poland creates a genre of critical and cultural dissertation of its own in our literature that has no predecessors and is probably impossible to repeat’, wrote Andrzej Mencwel. The book is a critique of contemporary historical and cultural consciousness conceived in such a way that critical reworking is combined in it with a positive philosophical and anthropological project. Of particular relevance to readers of Legenda Młodej Polski are the several studies. One is Kryzys Romantyzmu (The Crisis of Romanticism), a critique of the Romantic state of consciousness and a picture of the relationship between Romanticism and Young Poland. Also Polskie Oberammergau (Polish Oberammergau) which explores the missed opportunity of Romanticism. Another is Nasze ‘Ja’ i Historia (Our ‘I’ and History), which examines the relationship between history and life.
In Kryzys Romantyzmu, the critic wrote: ‘What is Romanticism based on? On the fact that man tries to create a world in which his “I” would not be a mindless spectator, he wants to create a world obedient to our will, corresponding to our thought, to our psyche’. This statement could be seen as the book’s axis of thought: regardless of whether Brzozowski writes about Norwid, Wyspiański or Żeromski, he will return to the theme of overcoming impotence, of independently creating a world for oneself: the basis for living and thinking. What is important: the famous formula ‘Romanticism is the rebellion of a flower against its roots’ illustrates such a spiritual situation in which there is no chance to face real life, not its hypostasis, however conceived. And this readiness is for Brzozowski an extremely important criterion for the emergence of formations that could meet the demands of the times. In the eyes of the critic, Young Poland was not a positive overcoming of Romanticism, on the contrary: it inherited most of its weaknesses, losing much of its potential for rebellion and change. The excellent studies on Wyspiański or Żeromski are important exposes of internal enslavement and ‘undercutting’ by an internalised Romanticism, which from an idea becomes a phantasm and a trap. Or: which in Polish culture has at the same time a bright, constitutive and inspiring obverse of ideas and a dark reverse: ‘the curse of idleness’ from Wyspiański’s Liberation.
Idee is an important attempt to come to grips with the heritage of European philosophy, annotated at the same time as an ‘Introduction to a philosophy of historical maturity’, in which one can already see the intention to construct his own project. Brzozowski declared that he wanted to collect in this book ‘a whole series of very general and fundamental philosophical issues and points, which remain in relation to the very pressing matters of our culture and historical life’. One of the patrons of the review of positions, which could be described as testing the attachment of individual philosophies to thinking in terms of determinism, became, not coincidentally, Norwid. Brzozowski has annotated his book with a motto from Norwid’s Garstka Piasku (A Handful of Sand), perfectly capturing the spirit of the whole: ‘and he who has detached himself from the conscience of history goes wild on a remote island [...]’. Not only Idee, but also the rest of his works, the critic wrote out of a longing for a philosophy that would make it possible to break with fatalism and recognise in oneself the disposition to transform reality – without losing the link to thinking about history.
Memoirs: what is it?
What role in Brzozowski’s legacy do the late notes written between 10th November 1910 and 5th April 1911 play? In them, the critic devised future books, wrote about illness and pain, ironised on the themes (and authors) of contemporary Polish culture, noted his reading impressions and threw in philosophical issues, often noted in aphoristic condensation. In the memoirs, we encounter Blake and Meredith, Carlyle and Newman, Norwid and Novalis. Newman’s ‘I know, I know’ resonates there particularly strongly in juxtaposition with Brzozowski’s proclamation of faith in the Church as an ‘inescapable fact’ of human life.
Memoirs reflects, moreover, not only the path of conversion and the description of the experience of modernity: its pages are testimony to a great intellectual and creative tension, a sense of crisis and breakthrough (just like the letters). Brzozowski wrote: ‘Undoubtedly, this is a critical time for me: youth has passed completely and a time has come in which one must no longer foreshadow, but give out things that can exist [...]. And at the same time, all the deficiencies in preparation are becoming clearer. All the omissions. Despair comes easier than looking calmly and coldly at things as they are’. Memoirs is, in the current research conjuncture, one of the most strongly inspiring texts by the author of Idee.
Voices in the Night
The collection of essays, Głosy Wśród Nocy (Voices in the Night), a testimony to Brzozowski’s fascination with English philosophy and literature, is an attempt to develop a new language for himself, which was planned several times (the critic changed the layout of the book). In his introduction to Voices in the Night, Ostap Ortwin writes that in parallel with composing the volume, Brzozowski decides to write things ‘in his old cutting and sharp style’, which makes the otherness of the diction all the more clear. The essay Charles Lamb was met, according to the author’s feelings, with a reception sensitive to new qualities of language and vision, and finally: to a modern model of subjectivity. Importantly: Voices in the Night recognises the validity of Romanticism and the uniqueness of Romantic philosophy.
Agata Bielik-Robson, author of The Spirit of the Surface – a book which contributed to planting the thread of Romantic revision on Polish ground – saw Brzozowski as one of the forerunners of this current of research. Undoubtedly, the researcher is right to expose that part of the oeuvre of the author of Płomienie (Flames) which emerged from his fascination with British literature and thought. Nevertheless, it should also be remembered that Brzozowski is also the author of the work Filozofia Romantyzmu Polskiego (The Philosophy of Polish Romanticism), which is quite different in tone, in which he wrote down the following remark: ‘Polish Romanticism is not a reflection or echo of some Western European cultural and literary current. I have neither the time nor the inclination to discuss views which derive works of art and literature from the influence of other works and order literature and art to live a ghostly life, drawing its content only from books.’
Novels
Marta Wyka, author of Brzozowski i jego Powieści (Brzozowski and His Novels), observes: ‘We used to read Brzozowski as a novelist innovator, thus remembering his points of arrival. Not much is generally said about his first attempts at it [...]’. Wyka stresses that the early Wiry (Vortexes) and Pod Ciężarem Boga (Under the Burden of God) can be read as a response to those generational experiences that gave birth to Berent’s Próchno (Dry Rot) on the one hand, the Revolution on the other. Pod Ciężarem Boga, one of Brzozowski’s two completed novels, was written in 1902 but – confiscated by the censors – was not published. Wiry is built on plots transplanted from Pod Ciężarem Boga, but it is not a transplant without corrections. The main character of the source book, Konrad Czyński – a magazine publisher, literary man and priest who has abandoned the priesthood – marries a liberated and strong woman. In the context of the novel, marriage becomes an attempt to break free from the pressure of religiosity, one of the varieties of escape into rationality. The final scene – the scene of the defeat of the man who disregarded Pascal, the ‘murderer of the Gods’ – becomes the scene of the collapse of the illusion of rationality: ‘Czyński fell to the floor. Everything disappeared... A strange light, Christ nailed to the Great Cross; his eyes look at Czyński, look and pity him’.
Płomienie was written in 1907 and published by Połoniecki in Lviv in 1908. The book’s protagonist, Michal Kaniowski, a nobleman by origin, enters Nechayev’s group and becomes a Russian revolutionary. Czesław Miłosz wrote about Kaniowski’s choice as follows:
During his stay in Siberia he meets the Polish exiles of 1863 and these cannot forgive him for going along with the Russians in his revolutionary activity: for them Russia is a wilderness chewed up by bribery and syphilis, a paper tiger. [...] No other writer in Poland, and to this day, has dared to reach into this shameful sphere, shaped by the collective subconscious, into the content of the rule imposing the conviction that entry into the “Russian world”, consent to this world, is tantamount to moral decline, eternal perdition of the soul [...].
The author of The Issa Valley emphasises a very important thing here: Płomienie is not only a book about the revolution, it is also a book about the attitude of Poles to what is Russian, about fear and resentment, about the difference of historical experiences and cultural perspectives. Brzozowski himself wrote about the novel:
[...] this will be confirmed by anyone who wants to read this book without prejudice, I have tried to present that the lack of a creative national consciousness must lead to the detachment of self-reliant individuals from the national commonality, to seeing life in abstract, simplifying dogmas, to the impossibility of finding a connection with the nation without relinquishing one’s own freedom.
The history of the reception of Płomienie remains in a dramatic, described in detail, entanglement with the famous Brzozowski case.
His greatest novelistic endeavour, Sam Wśród Ludzi (Alone Among Men), was in turn an important attempt at a fictional juxtaposition of the most important ideas of Brzozowski’s time, hardly more: an experiment in which all the author’s theoretical knowledge was to be put to the test. The novel was published in the month of the author’s death. It was designed as a series of clashes in which not only ideological discussions are important. It is about the clash of different sensitivities and visions of the world, which we follow from the very first pages of the book: the biography of Roman Ołucki will not reproduce the sensibility of the castellan Ogieński’s letter, that much is obvious. Irzykowski suggested reading Dębina (Sam Wśród Ludzi is the first part of this novel-project) as a developmental novel: ‘”Dębina” belongs to the type of so-called developmental romances, in which one shows how the protagonist – here Roman Ołucki – is brought up by life’.
Brzozowski as a theatre critic and playwright
Beginning his journalistic activities, Brzozowski was in constant contact with the theatre. He ran a theatre section in the magazine Głos, which – as Maria Prussak notes – shaped his language and metaphor of his later speeches. During the period of intensive review writing (until 1905), the critic developed judgements on Polish society, its tastes and attitudes. Charles Lamb from Voices in the Nights remains a testament to the persistence of his passion for theatre – and so does his writing on Wyspiański. Brzozowski recorded many accurate diagnoses of the writing of Polish authors, not only Polish ones, in his texts on theatre: ‘In his essence, Shakespeare was a poet of cosmic trust. Trust despite injustice, a crime he knew to the bottom. This poet of vision had faith in the darkness hiding behind the seen, and acknowledged it’ (Hamlet Wyspiańskiego).
Brzozowski the playwright cannot be forgotten either. In Mocarz (Mighty Man) – a drama about the bankruptcy of ‘all the stages of sentimentalism’, written for a competition in 1901 – Brzozowski illustrates what he called ‘cultural illusions’ in many other texts, including Legenda Młodej Polski. Here too, therefore, he fought for a thought free of illusions and ready-made cognitive clichés. Marta Piwińska writes: ‘In “Mocarz” we watch the crisis of individualism, we see how it comprehensively breaks, and we can reconstruct from its cracks Brzozowski’s paths of thought towards the philosophy of work, the critique of culture, the problem of alienation.’
Populariser, translator
Warto wspomnieć o działalności popularyzatorskiej i dydaktycznej Brzozowskiego. Nie zawsze pamięta się, że był on znakomitym, Brzozowski’s popularising and teaching activities are also worth mentioning. It is not always remembered that he was an excellent, charismatic speaker and that he was passionate about popularising philosophical knowledge. His temperament as an educator and teacher came out in a series of small books on people and ideas. The lecture Co to Jest Filozofia i Co o Niej Wiedzieć Należy (What is Philosophy and What One Should Know About It), published in 1902, explained philosophical issues ‘up until’ and ‘from’ the time of Kant. Naturally, the author of Idee speaks here in a somewhat different language to the one we know from Legenda Młodej Polski. The flow of reasoning and the tendency towards sentiment or aphorism are similar, but the work is written in a tone of gentle explanation of difficult matters and encourages exploration of what is important. ‘Philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom, and therefore something even more legitimate and important than even the pursuit of science. [...] Wise does not mean learned, just as learned does not yet mean wise’ – he wrote. Other publications in the Książki dla Wszystkich (Books for Everyone) series included a booklet on Józef Kremer and a work entitled Hipolit Taine jako Estetyk i Krytyk (Hippolyte Taine as an Aesthete and Critic). Brzozowski was also a translator, halted in his translation endeavours by a mercilessly developing illness. Here it is worth mentioning, for example, a selection of Cardinal Newman’s writings, to which Brzozowski added an important preface – a study, with an interesting reference to the ‘white-flowered’ (a neologism created by the critic) reading of Norwid.
Meetings, inspiration
A theme that scholars of Brzozowski’s oeuvre have often touched upon is the relationship between the philosophy of action and the philosophy of work in the critic’s ideological development. Andrzej Walicki, Bronisław Baczko, Andrzej Mencwel – this is only the beginning of a long list of names – have written about it. Of philosopher-thinkers, Nietzsche was very important to him, as has been written about many times in an attempt to indicate the peculiarity of Brzozowski’s reception of the writings of the author of Beyond Good and Evil. Not to be overlooked, of course, are Kant, Hegel, Vico and Bergson. At a certain point, Sorel became very important to Brzozowski, he was influenced by Avenarius, and he learned a lot from Marx, although one has to be careful here, because it was easy then to be labelled a ‘Marxist’, and Brzozowski distanced himself from Marxism in many of its forms. Russian thought, contemporary and 19th century, was also important to the author of Idee.
Selected works from the Książki dla Wszystkich (Books for Everyone) series:
- Co to Jest Filozofia i Co o Niej Wiedzieć Należy (What is Philosophy and What One Should Know About It), Part 1, Do Kanta (Up Until Kant), Part 2, Od Kanta (From Kant), Książki dla Wszystkich No. 71, 78, Warsaw, 1902.
- Hipolit Taine jako Estetyk i Krytyk (Hippolyte Taine as an Aesthete and Critic), Książki dla Wszystkich, no. 61, Warsaw, 1902.
- Logic (Logika), Książki dla Wszystkich No. 273, Warsaw, 1905.
- Stanisław Wyspiański jako Poeta: Szkic Krytyczny (Stanisław Wyspiański as a Poet: A Critical Sketch), Książki dla Wszystkich No. 118, Warsaw, 1903.
- Zasady Psychologii Popularnie Wyłożone (The Principles of Psychology Popularly Expounded), Książki dla Wszystkich No. 186, Warsaw, 1904.
First editions of selected works:
- Współczesna Powieść Polska (Modern Polish Novel), Literatura i Sztuka, vol. 1, Stanisławów, 1906.
- Współczesna Krytyka Literacka w Polsce (Modern Literary Critique in Poland), Literatura i Sztuka, vol. 5, Stanisławów, 1907.
- Płomienie: Z Papierów po Michale Kaniowskim Wydał i Przedmową Poprzedził Stanisław Brzozowski (Flames: From the Writings of Michał Kaniowski Edited and Prefaced by Stanisław Brzozowski), vol 1-2, B. Połoniecki, Lviv, 1908.
- Idee: Wstęp do Filozofii Dojrzałości Dziejowej (Ideas: Introduction to the Philosophy of Historical Maturity), B. Połoniecki, Lviv, 1910.
- Legenda Młodej Polski: Studia o Strukturze Duszy Kulturalnej (The Legend of Young Poland: Studies on the Structure of the Cultural Soul), B. Połoniecki, Lviv, 1910.
- Dębina: Powieść (Dębina: A Novel), part 1, "Sam Wśród ludzi", Lviv, 1911.
Posthumous publications:
- Głosy Wśród Nocy: Studia nad Przesileniem Romantycznym Kultury Europejskiej (Voices in the Night: Studies in the Romantic Solstice of European Culture), Lviv, 1912.
- Stanisław Wyspiański, edited and prefaced by K. Irzykowski, Literatura i Sztuka, vol. 8, Stanisławów, 1912.
- Pamiętnik (Memoirs), extracts from the author’s letters and explanatory notes supplemented by O. Ortwin, B. Połoniecki, Lviv, 1913.
- Widma Moich Współczesnych (Fikcyjne Portrety Satyryczne) – Książka o Starej Kobiecie (Fragment Powieści) (Spectres of My Contemporaries: Fictional Satirical Portraits – A Book About an Old Woman: Novel Excerpt), Lviv, 1914.
Selected works on Brzozowski:
- Stefania Zdziechowska, Stanisław Brzozowski jako Krytyk Literatury Polskiej, Kraków, 1927.
- Bogdan Suchodolski, Stanisław Brzozowski: Rozwój Ideologii, Warsaw, 1933.
- Józef Spytkowski, Stanisław Brzozowski. Estetyk – Krytyk, Kraków, 1939.
- Bronisław Baczko, Brzozowski – Filozofia Czynu i Pracy, Teksty, 1972, no. 3.
- Wokół myśli Stanisława Brzozowskiego, ed. A. Walicki and R. Zimand, Kraków, 1974.
- Andrzej Mencwel, Stanisław Brzozowski: Kształtowanie Myśli Krytycznej, Warsaw, 1976.
- Marian Stępień, Spór o Spuściznę po Stanisławie Brzozowskim w Latach 1918-1939, Kraków, 1976.
- Andrzej Walicki, Stanisław Brzozowski – Drogi Myśli, Warsaw, 1977.
- Marta Wyka, Brzozowski i jego Powieści, Kraków, 1981.
- Andrzej Walicki, Stanisław Brzozowski and the Polish Beginnings of ‘Western Marxism’, Oxford, 1989.
- Tomasz Burek, Spór Między Likwidatorami Młodej Polski, Twórczość 1991, no. 1.
- Stanisław Borzym, Pojęcie ‘Życia’ u Stanisława Brzozowskiego, in: Panorama Polskiej Myśli Filozoficznej, Warsaw, 1993.
- Michał Głowiński, Wielka parataksa: O Budowie Dyskursu w ‘Legendzie Młodej Polski’ S. Brzozowskiego, in: Ekspresja i Empatia: Studia o Młodopolskiej Krytyce Literackiej, Kraków, 1997.
- Małgorzata Czermińska, Autobiografia Duchowa w Dwudziestowiecznej Literaturze Polskiej, in:, Autobiograficzny Trójkąt: Świadectwo, Wyznanie i Wyzwanie, Kraków, 2000.
- Czesław Miłosz, Człowiek Wśród Skorpionów: Studium o Stanisławie Brzozowskim, Kraków, 2000.
- Andrzej Mencwel, ‘No! Io Non Sono Morto…’. Jak Czytać ‘Legendę Młodej Polski’?, Kraków, 2001.
- Andrzej Zawadzki, Nowoczesna Eseistyka Filozoficzna w Piśmiennictwie Polskim Pierwszej Połowy XX Wieku, Kraków, 2001.
- Ryszard Nycz, Wywoływanie Świata: Zadania Krytyki i Sztuki w Pisarstwie Filozoficznym Stanisława Brzozowskiego, in: Język Modernizmu. Prolegomena Historycznoliterackie, Wrocław, 2002.
- Maciej Urbanowski, Oczyszczenie. Studia o Literaturze Polskiej XX Wieku, Kraków, 2002.
- Andrzej Zawadzki, Dokument Pisany Kluczem. Kilka Uwag o Nowoczesnej Koncepcji Podmiotu i jej Kontekstach Filozoficznych na Przykładzie Poglądów Stanisława Brzozowskiego, Teksty Drugie 2002, s. 4.
- Paweł Pieniążek, Brzozowski. Wokół Kultury: Inspiracje Nietzscheańskie, Warsaw, 2004.
- Agata Bielik-Robson, Syndrom Romantyczny: Stanisław Brzozowski i Rewizja Romantyzmu, in: Romantyzm, Niedokończony Projekt: Eseje, Kraków, 2008.
Author: Eliza Kącka, March 2011
