Duch w osobie. Bohater w dramatach Juliusza Słowackiego

Abstract

In the book titled Spirit impersonated. Dramatis personae in Juliusz Slowacki’s works (Duch w osobie. Bohater w dramatach Juliusza Słowackiego) the author attmpts to discuss the issue of the complexity and ambiguity of Juliusz Slowacki’s dramatic characters with a focus on the interpretation of the two dramas: Mazepa (first published in 1840) known as the book created just before the mystical change in Słowacki’s work and Ksiądz Marek (first published in 1843) known as the first drama written after the spiritual change of the Polish Romantic poet. Shortly before the Słowacki’s internal transformation, which took place in 1842, the ambiguous characters typical for the author’s mystical period start to appear in his works. On the one hand, they are historical individuals often taken from the chronicles, on the other hand, they relate to the cultural models and archetypical figures found in myths and other cultural texts. They represent the different types of spiritual and archetypical abilities located on the vertical timeline which is a myth’s distinctive feature. That particular duality has a theological dimension which is represented by the characters infused with the God’s element what links them with transcendency. Accordingly, one of the characters in Ksiądz Marek describes the above quality as ‘a spirit impersonated in me’ (‘duch w mojej osobie’). Consequently, this book’s main aim is to identify the characters in the context of Słowacki’s mystical imagination and cultural phenomena. As a result the thesis statement of this paper can be presented as the following: In his dramatic works, Słowacki included the archetypes of characters which are perceived as the cultural models taken from the world famous religious and mythological texts. As a result he created a unique intertextual mythology consisting of the numerous cultural contexts in respect to the history defined as mythopoeia in literature. This paper not only portrays the cultural models presented in Sołwacki’s dramas but also demonstrates how they are processed, enriched with the new dimensions and shifted from the mythical sphere to the history. Consequently, in order to grasp the universal archetypes and mythical models in the individual work of Słowacki, the appropriate methodology is applied. With the focus on literature perspective, cultural accounts as well as theological contexts, which reflect the Polish eminent cultural and historical issues discussed by Słowacki, are taken into consideration. Therefore, Słowacki’s characters are distinguished as the well-know cultural models of a trickster, a divine wife (cosmic woman, mother goddess), an exalted old man (apocalyptic prophet, saint lunatic) and they are confronted with the poet’s vision of the world. Hence, this vision happens to be based on his perception of a human nature and spirituality determined by the phenomena of a human longing for good, beauty and eternity coexisting with an inclination for chaos, madness and wrongdoing. As a result, the analysis reveals a profound symbolism in Słowacki’s mystical characters: a human seen with the poet’s eyes carries an image of a different world represented by God’s reality which is unachievable and to be experienced in and through a human only. Thus, Słowacki’s key aspect in search for belief, sense and belief in sense is the opposition of a spirit and a human body. The search is accompanied with deep cognition of cultural texts (Bible, myths), often concentrated on personal models. It brings Słowacki nearer to the writers doubting in metaphysics, suffering from the spiritual crisis of the new era which is discussed in the last chapter enclosing the comparison of the Słowacki and Pär Lagerkvist’s works.