Relying on Maurice Maeterlinck’s essays, the article reflects on the question of human perception of insects, especially termites. Spatially enclosed termitemounds impose specific way of life which, in Maeterlinck’s view, resembles human way. Following Gernat Böhme’s argument, this realization can only be attained if one accepts emotions in perception. By writing about “places of imprisonment” of living creatures, Maeterlinck was the first to depict human living space as natural imprisonment. At the same time, in his entomological monographs he initiated human experiencing of nature; the process which Böhme described as situating man in his surroundings.
The author presents Miłosz as a critic of modern writers (Balzac in the first place) analyzing in particular one of Miłosz’s wartime essays – The legend of monster-city. The author presents particular tropes used by Miłosz in his critical statements about modern artists and modernity itself. The poet repeats Tocqueville’s gesture and like the author of Democracy in America he is looking for a new language which could be used to describe the modern world and, in particular, literature which first tried to capture the new reality. For Miłosz the source of “critical vocabulary” is Balzac’s oeuvre itself as well as Baudelaire’s poetry and his essay The painter of the modern life. The “legend” about the 19th century “monster-city” reflects the process of emerging of the new critical discourse capable of describing both – the features of new literature as well as the emerging modernity itself.
The article presents an analysis of Eliza Orzeszkowa’s short story Wielki (The Great One) from the collection Melancholicy and poses a question about the borderline separating interpretation from over-interpretation. The process of reading allows the interpreter to identify musical motifs, in particular Beethoven’s string quartet Opus 135 Muss es sein? / Es muss sein! (Does it have to be so? / It has to be so!) which expresses the sad truth that the novella’s suffering character Juliusz, a violin virtuoso, discovers. In the last part of the article its author questions such an interpretative move and recalls statements which discuss the limits of literary commentaries.
The author discusses Sońka – the new novel by Ignacy Karpowicz. There are numerous literary clichés in the novel. It starts with the fairy tale-like narrative frame, evoked by the phrase “once upon a time” (“dawno, dawno temu”) as well as the motif of Biblical catastrophe indicated by a phrase “just before the deluge”. In this framework Karpowicz places many scenes which imitate well-known literary or Biblical motifs in order to tell a story of love and desire between a village girl and an SS-Mann Joachim. Yet Sońka – a girl from Królowe Stojło – does not allow to be carried away by literary clichés, even though only because of them she could appear on the stage of a theatre in Warsaw. The tension generated by this “eluding” gives birth to the narrative about the events which occurred “once upon time” – a narrative focused entirely on the female body. Words describing the experiences of female body, whose impression last for the whole lifetime, are immersed in literariness. As Sońka’s body is “entangled in the spokes of history” so is she herself, as a created character, caught into theatrical machinery of the novel. Her story is entangled with “something more”, something exceeding the history itself, which turns Sońka into something more valuable: ’Saint’ Sońka of ‘Countless Sorrows’ – a character of hagiographic nature.
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.
The article presents Bolesław Prus’s view on painting and photography. In his weekly chronicles Prus often practiced some kind of “looking exercise”, aiming at the essence of painting. Prus’s adventure with paintings is, as the author claims, an adventure of a modern man, caught in the “vortex of modernity”, a vortex of constant changes, which make people encounter new things. In Prus’s case the new thing is photography, which he initially affirms, or even treats as superior to paintings and print, and later criticizes, but still accepting its value. This act of rejection is in fact a defence of artistic independence. The author, referring to Marshall Berman’s views, does not treat Prus’s gesture as anything unusual. Such an act characterises a 19th century artist, whose negations are always mixed with affirmations and eventually never deny the value of what is negated.
The author analyses the problem of circumstances in which Darwin discovered the mechanizm of natural selection and struggle to survive – a discovery that marked human being with “an indelible stigma”. The stigma is a special kind of “a hurt identity”, an identity, which hurts. Darwin’s discovery marked human beings with the “indelible stigma” of low descent, which endowed men with negative identity – of a being without origin. As a result in the 19th century people had to face the question of their own identity. Analysing the memoir The Voyage of The Beagle the author claims, that observations Darwin made during the journey (in particular the geological ones) changed his perception of time. Geological ruins revealed before young Darwin the nature of time, whose essence is dissemination – ie. irretrievable change. His views were confirmed by the earthquake in Chile in 1835 – where a sudden move of the earth’s crust became an image of time which perceived a catastrophe spread over thousands of years. Hence, as the author claims, Darwin’s memoire from the journey, and in particular its part which describes the earthquake in Chile foreshadows the Marxian statement that everything “vanishes”.
Artykuł omawia wykładnię protestantyzmu Heinricha Heinego, zaprezentowaną w esejach: Szkoła romantyczna (1833-35) i Z dziejów religii i filozofii w Niemczech. 95 tez Marcina Lutra stało się czymś w rodzaju „teologicznej miny” (H. Schelling), której wybuch przyczynił się m. in. do ogołocenia z obrazów protestanckich kościołów i zastąpienia ich „muzycznym obrazem” – religijną kantatą. Heinrich Heine w sporze o handel opustami doszukał się oznak szerszego procesu: walki chrześcijańskiego spirytualizmu z pogańskim sensualizmem, dowodząc, że ów konflikt odbija również renesansowe malarstwo, które określił mianem „swoistego protestantyzmu”, uznając odmalowane przez Tycjana „uda Wenus” za kolejną tezę Lutra. Heine utożsamia „ducha protestantyzmu” z wolnością, a to każe mu spojrzeć na sztukę renesansu jako na proces emancypacji spod jarzma katolickiego spirytualizmu.
EN
A presentation of a teaching of Protestantism according to Heinrich Heine, contained in the essays: The Romantic School (1833-1835) and The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany. The Martin Luther 95 theses became a sui generis “theological mine” (H. Schelling), whose explosion contributed to, i.a. the removal of paintings from Protestant churches and replacing them with “a musical canvas” - the religious cantata. In the dispute about the sale of indulgences Henrich Heine sought the signs of a wider process: the battle waged by Christian spiritualism against pagan sensualism, proving that this conflict was also reflected by Renaissance painting, which he defined as Protestantism of sorts while recognising “the loins of Venus” executed by Titian to be a successive thesis by Luther. Heine identified the “spirit of Protestantism” with freedom, and this compelled him to perceive Renaissance art as a process of emancipation from the yoke of Catholic spiritualism.
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