Poland is Falling: Stanisław Orzechowski and His Utopian Anxiety

• In Event: Fear and Angst in Early Modern East Central Europe

Abstract

This paper studies Polish writer and utopist Stanisław Orzechowski (1513-1566) and his
enduring emotional engrossment in the chaotic politics of mid-sixteenth-century Poland.
While envisioning the Christian utopia of a priestly-royal state, Orzechowski was always
and relentlessly using the rhetoric of the imminent Polish downfall as a clear note of
dystopian warning. This apocalyptic call reveals the thinker’s intense anxiety over the
current affairs and future peace of Jagiellonian Poland. This paper attempts to capture
such an emotive metaphor as a cultural key to the Polish Renaissance mentality.

Author

• Václav Zheng, Johns Hopkins U