The author characterizes the functions of fear (anxiety) in Young Poland's vividness and perception of the world. Omnipresent and various forms of anxiety strengthened the characteristic of the epoch pessimism, and also proved to be, as in the case of Tadeusz Micinski's poetry, an existential challenge. The richest repertoire of anxiety neuroses is observed in Stanislaw Przybyszewski's writings, in which one can distinguish between three types of an alarmed man. The first is a searcher of liberation from the hell of fears (in prose poems), the second - an ambivalent slave to anxiety and a discoverer (due to his experience of fear) of the real being (in the novels on an artist) and the third, a perverse creator of a total terror which stimulates the protagonist's imagination and also destroys him (in Satanist novels).
The author compares two 'Young Poland' novellas, Stefan Zeromski's 'Silaczka' (Strongwoman), publ. 1891 and Tadeusz Micinski's 'Nauczycielka' (The Teacher), publ.1896, and revised in 1911. Both versions of the latter are included in the comparison, which juxtaposes the distinctly polarized portraits of the two main women characters. The article reconstructs Micinski's polemical strategies aimed at debunking the unequivocal social commitment and moral idealism of Zeromski's heroine. An additional insight into the character of the idealistic 'strongwoman' can be gained from the entries in Joasia Podborska's diary (in Zeromski's novel 'Homeless People'); however, the inclusion of that source complicates the intertextual relations between the two principal texts.
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