Kolczasta sensualność. Miasto szwedzkich melancholików przełomu XIX i XX wieku

• Authors: Wojciechowski, Paweł

Abstracts

PL

The text shows the picture of nineteenth-century Stockholm saturated with negative content, revealing a large city as a space of deadness, chimerical vitalism, and unconditional dissolution as a result of crisis of values. Symptomatic for the nineteenth-century European social changes made the literary city a reflection of this process by showing the urban monstrosity of that destructive energy, its unfriendliness and controversy. This case is similar. The novelistic city shows multidimensional loneliness of man of that time. This image maps the entity which is not able to save its subjectivity, to find the formula, the man who from the heights of his own selfishness precipitates his identity into the abyss of all progression. It also shows the doom of rudimentary value, flattening of anthropocentric dimension of existence in favour of the eruption of animalistic instincts, impulses and consumerism. The characters in Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel – Martin, Arvid, Gabriel or Tomas – circulate in this space, wander, chase, roam the empty area looking for values. The characters being in chronic pointless movement automatically include themselves in an insensitive stream of street momentum, as they were passively involved in this whole theatre of gestures. Stockholm is a symbol of the inertial city, neutral existentially, it is a braid of illusions, fantasies, afterimages. The city is a zone of axiological deadness, damages. A sad face of the city chronically becomes a grimace of everything that is wrong, hardening into the “damage”, closure. It is an unusual character of this prose.

Keywords

PL

Swedish literature; fin de siècle; city; Stockholm; Hjalmar Söderberg

• Publisher: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
• Journal: Przegląd Humanistyczny
• Year: 2018
• Volume: 62(2 (461))
• Pages: 109-127

Dates

published

2018-09-28

Contributors

author

Wojciechowski, Paweł

Identifiers

DOI

10.5604/01.3001.0012.5796