This article is concerned with the early verse and fiction of Jiri Karasek ze Lvovic (1871-1951), which is considered in the context of his work in general and the literature of his day. This period of his work consists in a line running from the mirroring of reality (of the Realist and Naturalist trends, for example, the attempt at the verisimilitude of the story and the characters' language; emphasis on the formation or deformation of personality by the milieu) to its internalization and subsequent refashioning (in the spirit of the Symbolist Decadent reassessment of the subject-object relationship). This variegated stylistic change is accompanied by a clear-cut differentiation of the characters (that is, interest in the personalities who are unusual on account of their attitude to the world and themselves), an incisive psychologization (ranging from reflections of ordinary feelings as motives for actions, characterization of the actors, an interest in the dark side of the human thought, to stream of consciousness, which together create a wide-ranging imagination and various movements of the inner man), and an increasing scepticism towards both the possibilities of human knowledge and the mechanisms of modern society.
The article takes a closer look at the artistic life in Krakow at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Activities of the artists, led by Stanislaw Przybyszewski, and all in the social-café-salon life make it possible to distinguish a completely new kind of bohemianism: exquisite, noble and even aristocratic. Krakow Bohemians comprised of the very elite of the cultural life: renowned artists – mainly professors of the Academy of Fine Arts – prominent actors, talented writers and poets, influential critics. A time of the triumph of the bohemian circle coincided with the era of major exhibitions, shown not only in Krakow, but also in Vienna. Though initially shocking the Galician bourgeois mentality, with time bohemians became more and more influential, promoting a new style and created, at the end Polish modernism.
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