W drodze do źródeł bytu. Symbolika czarnomorskiej przestrzeni w Sonetach Krymskich Adama Mickiewicza

Abstract

In 1825, Adam Mickiewicz – who was temporarily staying in Odessa by the tsar's sentence of exile – went on a trip to the Crimea. The Crimean Sonnets, recognized by the researchers of Romanticism as revolutionary and innovative, are a direct account of this trip. One of the essential poetic intentions of this cycle is to visualize the vastness of space experienced by the lyrical "I". Space – It has to be emphasized here – of the Black Sea region. This essay is an attempt to read its ambiguous symbolism. In the light of the research in the field of humanistic geography on the phenomenon of "space" and "place", It is interpreted here as the implication of the freedom of the world, which, along with its traverse, is being experienced by the protagonist of the poems. Therefore, his journey appears – in accordance with cultural anthropology's thought – as an attempt to satisfy a deep, balancing sense of security and homeliness, the need of a human being to discover what is unknown. During this journey, the protagonist in the sonnets is seen as a tourist tasting the world and at the same time as a pilgrim heading for the source of existence. This is a complicated figure of a wanderer/tourist/pilgrim/mystic, in which we find characteristic features of a biography of a Romantic – and of a human being in general.