Pirandello, czyli jak nie dowierzać swojej rzeczywistości
Pirandello, or how not to trust your reality

Summary/Abstract: The essay attempts to present Pirandello’s esthetics as an heir of Piranesi’s esthetics of the ruin. As Umberto Eco claims, a turn towards fragments allows for abandoning the idea of the work of art as an accomplished whole, what is more, it locates the esthetic pleasure in a contemplation of a whole destroyed and fragmented. Thus, a draft becomes more interesting than a finished work. Literature holds control over form, that is over language, but – as Pirandello demonstrates – literature is a cold institution unable to contain the warmth and pulsation of life which always slips out of literature’s jurisdiction. Hence Pirandello’s work is an important episode in the history of Western rationalism and aims its critical edge against the failed attempts to construct a world according to the working principles of rationality and common sense.

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