Nostalgia for the Future: Life as a Story in Juliusz Slowacki's Letters to His Mother

Drawing on Charles Taylor and Anthony Giddens's concepts of narrativism, Sikora examines how the Polish Romantic poet Juliusz Slowacki constructs his identity in his letters to his mother, Salomea Becu. Keeping in mind the genre differences between diaries, memoirs and letters, as well as the framework of sentimental culture, she points to the specificity of this identity project, in which the present is experienced through the prism of an imagined future recollection, while being aware that the task of reflecting is at the same time a task for the imagination. Such a construction of a nostalgic subject, based on Svetlana Boym, is presented as part of the tradition of"off-modernism,"which eludes the dominant vision of modernity based on progress.