Critics have interpreted Tarjei Vesaas’s novel The Ice Palace (1963) in psychological terms as a kind of rite-of-passage fable of two eleven-year-old girls, Siss and Unn. The latter dies in a magic Ice Palace short after their first meeting in Unn’s house. The novel’s plot is about how Siss is dealing with the loss. Other scholars put the emphasis on the folkloristic elements or read the text as an allegorical one, as a piece of art dealing with art.In the following article I would like to read The Ice Palace as a poetic treatise on the relationship between mourning, melancholy on the one hand and commemoration, memorialization on the other.
One of the masterpieces of Polish cinema is the debut film by Witold Leszczyński The Days of Matthew (1967, Żywot Mateusza). It is an adaptation of the novel Fuglane by Tarjei Vesaas, which appeared in translation into Polish in 1964. Leszczyński’s awarded film work has become an object of numerous analyses. However, there has been no particular research on the origins of The Days of Matthew. This article aims at presenting and interpreting the genesis of the film, viewed from three different perspectives: the existential, the ethical and the technical one. The study is largely based on previously unknown information or rarely cited sources.
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