EN
The essay presents the “flame dreamers” fascinated by kerosene lamps and gas lighting: Bachelard, Benjamin and, last but not least, Bohumil Hrabal, whose novels Taka piękna żałoba (Such a beautiful mourning) and Postrzyżyny (Cutting it short) describe childhood fascination with the beauty of those lamps. However, due to the twentieth century modernization, those lamps were replaced by electric light. Thus one can say that Benjamin and Hrabal lived in the times of decline of kerosene lamps and gas lighting, the lamps which added colours to their childhood world. The author links the disappearing of kerosene and gas lamps with the typically modern process of “colonizing the night” (A. Giddens). In this respect gas lighting and electric light become an element of the same process of the constant modernization. However, the writers of the emerging modernity clearly differentiate between the two types of lighting. They never sing praises of the “beauty” of electric bulb, yet quite often they admire the charm of gas and kerosene lamps which are bound to vanish. Thus they celebrate the loss as such, without realising what else is lost with their decline. This experience finds its fullest expression through language, in particular in the disappearance of the possessive pronouns (G. Bachelard). Electric bulbs are not wrapped in such words as my, mine, our, as kerosene or gas lamps used to be, and, as a consequence, modern man loses a friendly relationship with the surrounding objects.