Grażyna Borkowska (Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences)
Sienkiewicz’s Theatre of Cruelty

In a slightly meandering fashion, my text examines the problems of violence and physical suffering present in Sienkiewicz’s prose. What is their origin? I am unable to formulate one strong hypothesis. Sienkiewicz’s “theatre of cruelty” had various sources. It came from the mystic-messianic atmosphere that permeated Polish romanticism, from the popular auto-definition of a Pole as a victim – the key figure in our 19th century culture, perhaps from the baroque imagination, which harmonized with the historical realities of Sienkiewicz’s works, and also from the recognition of a universal code that organizes the order of world (a pre-Socrates code, which was rescued from oblivion by modernism) – the world where war and love, death and love are the forces that establish the common rules of the game. Perhaps, it came also from Sienkiewicz’s own physical condition, considered as unsatisfactory by the writer, painful, connected with some indisposition, physical debilitas, causing the kind of torment that he projected in his novels.


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The logic of suffering (Tadeusz Zieliński)

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The logic of suffering II (Maria Konopnicka)

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Mystique of death I (Stanisław Tarnowski)

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Portret pośmiertny Samuela Zborowskiego, 1702, Muzeum Narodowe w Kielcach
Mystique of death II (Magdalena Saganiak’ Samuel Zborowski)

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Ukrzyżowanie (rewers portretu pośmiertnego Sanuela Zborowskiego), 1702, Muzeum Narodowe w Kielcach
Dionysian Sienkiewicz (Jarosław M. Rymkiewicz’ Samuel Zborowski)

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Kazimierz Pochwalski, portret Henryka Józefa Sienkiewicza (syna pisarza), 1906, Pałacyk Henryka Sienkiewicza w Oblęgorku - oddział Muzeum Narodowego w Kielcach
Dionysian Sienkiewicz II (Dionysus and Nietzsche)

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Józef Brandt, Zaloty. Kozak z dziewczyną przy studni, 1875, Muzeum Narodowe w Kielcach
Violence and eroticism I (Rape space)

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Maurycy Gottlieb, Taniec Salome, ok. 1879, Muzeum Narodowe w Kielcach
Violence and eroticism II (Psychoanalysis)

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Violence and eroticism III (Letter to Daniel Zgliński)