Słowacki „świerszczem głośny”. Muzykujące owady w Królu-Duchu

Abstract

This work records all the occurrences of the cricket motif in both the basic text and in numerous different versions of King-Spirit by Juliusz Słowacki. It analyses and interprets the scenes in which that motif appears using, among other things, the traditional symbolism of the cricket and insects mistakenly treated as its equivalents (grasshopper, bush cricket, cicada). The studies indicate that the cricket motif is linked to two characters in the poem – Popiel (three cases) and Mieczysław (the remaining cases). Among the examples analysed, the elaborations of the scene presenting the night preceding the ancient Slavic rite of the hair clipping of blind Mieczysław (Rhapsody III) dominates. In this case, the motif reveals its entire multitude of meanings: a) the insects’ chirping signals the coming of the times of opening the eyes to the truth; b) their hissing may be a warning against the ghosts of the past; c) their symbolism is linked to the household or the man praising God; d) they are wardens of native tradition, a mainstay of the faith, support and consolation; e) they mean the sorrow stemming from the crush of the royal “idyll” with the curse resting on Popiel; f) they have in them something of the “rhapsodic characters” but also “good spirits” and household deities; g) with their smallness and evanescence they highlight the status of Mieczysław, who feels his difference; h) they inscribe themselves in the order of existence as eternal horror; i) they make sounds like ghosts of the dead in the cedar coffins of burial mounds; j) they make the sound which magnifies the pain. The meaning of crickets is, as can be seen, ambivalent – they are good, but at the same time melancholic spirits that help the characters whilst simultaneously disturbing them; they wake them up and put them to sleep.