„Gdybym przespał aż do ranka...”. Miciński – (Szymanowski) – Iwaszkiewicz

Abstract

Tadeusz Miciński’s art exerted infl uence on Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz both directly and indirectly, through the mediation of Karol Szymanowski’s music and through the stories about Miciński that Szymanowski told Iwaszkiewicz, his younger cousin. As often noted in the literature, the infl uence of Miciński’s imagination is most noticeable in the libretto of King Roger, jointly written by Szymanowski and Iwaszkiewicz. Although Iwaszkiewicz highly valued Miciński’s novel Wita, he parodied the style of his prose. However, the most important infl uence on Iwaszkiewicz’s work was exerted by Miciński’s poems from the W mroku gwiazd [In the Darkness of the Stars] collection, references to which can be seen in Iwaszkiewicz’s poetry from the interwar period as well as in the much later Ciemne ścieżki [Dark Paths] collection. Also, some poems that did not make it to the Ciemne ścieżki collection and are only known from manuscripts or typescripts contain clear references to easily identifi able lyrical poems by Miciński, mainly those that were set to music by Karol Szymanowski. In his lyrical cycle of poems published in the Ciemne ścieżki collection, Iwaszkiewicz creates ‚song lyrics for a dead composer’ – in a kind of literary rivalry with Miciński. The poems can also be seen as a tribute to the two great artists, who had been long deceased at the time when the collection was published. One can speculate that Iwaszkiewicz was driven by what R. Girard called “mimetic desire”.