Fantasmagorie ironisty, czyli gdzie błądzi Chryzostom Bulwieć Gałczyńskiego

Abstract

The author of the article analyses one of the most mysterious and insufficiently researched satirical and ironic poem by Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (1905–1953), entitled: Chryzostoma Bulwiecia podróż do Ciemnogrodu [Chryzostom Bulwieć’s Trip to Ciemnogród] (1953). It was expected to be a propagandist work, commissioned during the Stalinist period. Its genre and aesthetic classification also raised certain controversies. The dilemmas of scholars who focused on the writer’s entanglement in the political system of Communism do not completely solve the issue of the fundamental problem of the poem, namely: what it is about. What is the subject of the longest poem, consisting of 300 four-verse stanzas, a total of 945 five-syllabic verses? In the meantime, Gałczyński had a perfect sense of the political dictatorship and he knew well how to “wander” across the world of Socialist realist nonsense. According to the author, the poet wrote a hybrid work, which is difficult to interpret unambiguously, in the times of rampant Stalinist censorship. Gałczyński creates a satirical poetic universe underlined by irony, where the history of mankind is an incessant “madness and collapse”, chaos resembling a recurrent motif in the opera. Bulwieć is a vision of a man who is lost not on the roads of the world, but within himself.