SOCIAL-METAPHYSICAL VERSION OF HUMAN FATE IN THE ANTONI MALCZEWSKI’S POEM “MARIA”

Abstract

The discourse of fate in the lyric-epic poem “Maria” (1825) by Polish Romantic poet Antoni Malczewski is analyzed. The work has two problem-thematic planes: 1) regional Ukrainian-Polish (geographical-cultural-ethnic), which fits into the framework of geopoetics, and 2) existential-metaphysical. In addition, parallel to the development of a dual plot, in which two lines are intertwined – socio-historical (repelling Tatar raids) and loving and familial – there are interspersions of accompanying conceptual and figurative semantics, one part of which (characteristic romantic imagery, topics typical of the “Ukrainian school” in Polish romanticism) creates a cultural and historical flavor, and the other (existential and psychological concepts) sets the tone for an existential-anthropological, metaphysical worldview. In this suggestion, the concept of “los” occupies a dominant position, manifested in a synonymous series of words: “los”, “dola”, “Fortuna”. The concept sphere of “los” also includes vocabulary for describing the forces that determine fate, their actions and judgments, ambivalent feelings, and human emotional reactions to the vicissitudes of fate. Archetypal dichotomies play an essential role in the poem: Earth/Sky, Society/Transcendent God, Life/Death, Fate/Misfortune, Light/Darkness, Day/Night, Virtue/Deception, Happiness/Unhappiness.

The poem contains foreboding of the main characters (Wacław, Maria, and her father) and prophetic signs, but there are no articulated prophecies – with the exception of allegorical allusive predictions in the pseudo-carnival song of masks, which performs a symbolic and metaphorical prophetic function. The narrator-poet focuses on the psychology of the characters, their experiences, and their perceptions of the fatal twists of fate that occur for unknown reasons. Only in passing does the work raise the question of what metaphysical force influences human destiny. The insertion into the plot of a seemingly entertaining and playful “masquerade” with songs and dance, shifted in relation to the ritual calendar (in summer, not in the winter carnival), introduces an essential element of pseudo-carnivalization into the poem.

A typological similarity in the depiction of evil and the interpretation of fate can also be traced in the poem “Maria” and in the works of Ukrainian “black romanticism” – the ballads “The Girl under a Spel”, “The Poplar”, “The Drowned Maiden”, and the poems “The Witch”, “The Princess”, “The Sexton’s Daughter” by T. Shevchenko, and the Russian-language story “The Fire Serpent” by P. Kulish. While A. Malczewski expressed the idea of the causelessness of tragic metaphysical doom, P. Kulish artistically expressed the motif of heavenly punishment for sinful love. The early Romantic poem “Maria” is a precursor not only to the further development of “black Romanticism,” but also to similar manifestations in modernism (the drama “Little Eyolf” by H. Ibsen, the surrealistic American series “Twin Peaks”).