Granice niewinności i doświadczenia. Romantyczne topografie dzieciństwa (Lenartowicz – Blake, Kraszewski – Wordsworth)

Abstract

The author begins with a reference to a fragment of Thomas Mann’s The Buddenbrooks, as an example of the perception of place by a child (the little Hanno on the sea), which becomes the starting point for an anthropological interpretation of territories in the works by Polish and English Romantics, who represented the world as seen by a child. In the second part, the author proposes a juxtaposition of William Blake, a mystic poet, with the Masovian lyrist, Teofil Lenartowicz, which constitutes an attempt at the territorialization or spatialization of the analysis itself. The author aims to juxtapose the juvenile topographies delineated by both authors in an attempt to create a temporary interpretative configuration. Blake’s and Lenartowicz’s juvenile topographies, marked by simplicity and poverty, can be seen as carriers of intricate meanings. Both poets construed their child characters and settings as the territories of an unending and complex process of oscillation between “not yet” and “nevermore”. Moreover, both of them use their works as staging grounds for an endless odyssey of the borderland, a place where immortal innocence and unavoidable corruption can be experienced. In the third section, the author juxtaposes juvenile experiences of nature in the first book of Wordsworth’s Prelude and in Ignacy Kraszewski’s novels Poeta i świat (The Poet and the World) and Powieść bez tytułu (A Novel without Title), which feature a confrontation between provincial and urban boyhood. In the novels, the whole life of both poet‑protagonists is a sequence of unsuccessful attempts to return to the momentary union with places and women, which they experienced as youthful epiphanies. In Wordsworth’s text, the poet returning to the microcosm of childhood does not cease to be gentle and unruly, someone as whimsical as an adult lover. He is under no illusion that the repetition and copying the map of his first experiences may bring back initial harmony. The study focused on literary geo‑representations of divided artists, who tried to show the inextricable knot that marks the process of coming of age.