O społecznej koncepcji i jej artystycznym wcieleniu w Ostapie Bondarczuku Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego
About the social concept and its artistic embodiment in Ostap Bondarczuk by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski

Summary/Abstract: The article highlights the fact that the author’s deep setting consists in opposing the eddy currents of modernity and the bright “Napoleonic” possibilities of the era to a certain hidden metaphysical program, which would be perceived by positivists as “natural”. Nevertheless, but the writer himself interpreted it more in the spirit of romanticized Christian folk wisdom. Ultimately, Krashevski’s perspective for a person to go beyond the limits of his class and the mentality conditioned by it, to “liberate himself,” is hampered by the persistence of this original program. Theprogram is based on the biblical-folklore archetype of the primordial physical-social inequality of people, equal only in original sin. For all the sincerity of the count’s desire to turn Ostap into “his”, into “Eustachiy”, with all the efforts of the latter to justify the hopes of the new parents, the central character does not show daring, the ability to seriously go beyond the stencil predetermined by birth and the first years of life. And the fact that Ostap, against his will, “changed his fate”, did not make him really free and happy. A genuine change in social role is achieved not by “fabulous” mercy from the outside, but by personal hard work and selfless devotion: this would be of interest to the positivist. In other words, we are still dealing with a fundamentally romantically integral mono-character of the protagonist. On the other hand, J.I Krashevski only partially and very fluently used the positivist individual methods of depicting a person in a dynamic environment as additional material, which enriched the author’s style, but did not change his artistic method.

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