Romantyczność hałdy

Abstract

Landscape thinking, formed in the late 18th and 19th centuries (Anglo-Saxon tradition, Ukrainian school), fundamentally influenced the way literary images of space were created. To a large extent, this phenomenon extended to descriptions of the natural formation of the land, or alternatively to places where man inserted his conception of space into a given geographical area. Industrial spaces, shown in the perspective of a symbolic biblical Babylon or Dantean Hell, contrasted sharply with the accepted convention. Yet it was precisely this dark imagery that became the basis of the ‘new beauty’. What had been discarded – the heap, a symbol of the Upper Silesian landscape – has acquired a symbolic meaning in the last half-century. Expressed in language, painting, photography, film or music, the story of the ‘smoking mountains’ has become the basis of a new myth underpinned by romantic aesthetic and ethical concepts. The aim of this article is to examine the mechanisms of the ‘romanticisation’ of the heap in contemporary cultural narratives. Starting from Zygmunt Gloger’s descriptions of the industrial landscape, the article refers to the paintings of Franciszek Starowieyski, the photographs of Radosław Kobierski, the film Angelus by Lech Majewski and the songs of the band Oberschlesien.