EN
This article examines a phenomenon associated with a certain – and today increasingly common – attitude in life that can most simply be described as the marriage of inauthenticity with imitationism. The author focuses her attention on feelings of love (as particularly ‘severe’, and at the same time probably the most mythologised), or rather on their literary depiction, which allows an accurate diagnosis to be made of the sensibility typical of a consumer society obsessed with money, subject to the dictates of mass media and under pressure from the ideals and ideas of pop culture. A diagnosis of this kind comes in the form of Jacek Dehnel’s short story Miłość korepetytora [Love of the Tutor], which together with three other stories comprises the volume Balzakiana (2008). The young Polish writer, attempting to determine the condition of Polish society after the political transformation in 1989, makes conscious reference to the distant tradition of realistic prose from the legacy of Honoré de Balzac. As for a review of the sphere of individual feelings and emotions falsified by various stereotypes and abstract ideas, one can look to a tradition closer to Dehnel: namely the only novel of Karol Irzykowski – Pałuba [The Hag] (1903). The article shows some commonalities between the Young Poland concept of ‘successive-world phenomena’ and the contemporary vision of determining the emotional sphere through pop culture templates on the experience of romantic elation. References to the diagnoses of Abraham Moles, Milan Kundera and Hermann Broch allow, additionally in the cited contexts, the issues of ‘exaltation as a replacement of spirituality’ and kitsch as ‘our daily aesthetic and morality’ to be highlighted.