Tumult wileński A. D. 1639. Wokół powieści Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego Kościół Świętomichalski w Wilnie

Abstract

Street riots of the year 1639 between Calvinists and Catholics in a multi‑religious Vilnius, known in historiography as the tumult of Vilnius, and its epilogue at the Sejm of Warsaw in 1640, have been widely commented and discussed by historians. Kraszewski’s novel also refers to this issue and presents nineteenth-century readers the heroes of this incident, both individual figures and urban crowd. The writer refers to source documents and traces the urban narrative immersed in a particular space, in the lives of the former residents of Vilnius, and in the history of their home. Passages from the source documents included in the book do not only play a historical role, they can also be used to analyze the mentality of the previous generations presented in an informal way. Mental structures, which have been set as a motto of this article, rely on constant interference of supernatural reality into the earthy matters. However, this happens differently than in Dziady by Mickiewicz. It is not the influence of angles on “human thoughts and actions” that determines human ability to create, or moral assessment of human deeds. In the book by Kraszewski, those are worldly systems of power and human passions, metaphorically represented by an arrow in the leg St. Michael that shape religious ideas and refer human of “flesh” to the transcendent realm of angels and demons slipping out of their feet. In addition, they influence on the course of earthly things (the war of words, populist religious indoctrination). Sacred architectural design of the church of St. Michael becomes a symbolic and physical background of the plot. Thus this sets our imagination in the space that is perceived and utilized here and now.