Widmo wychodzi z podziemi. „Domofon” Zygmunta Miłoszewskiego a „Zagłada domu Usherów” Edgara Allana Poego
The phantom comes out of the underground. Zygmunt Miłoszewski's "Entry Phone" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of the Usher

Summary/Abstract: The concept of hauntology, created by Jacques Derrida, reveals new meanings of those literary works whose essence are liminal places, that are binding the past and the present and former and present tenants with the yoke of crime. Such places include both the crypt from The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe and the basement from the novel Domofon [The Intercom] (2005) by Zygmunt Miłoszewski. These become places where spectres live. Both works are connected by the aesthetics of Gothicism, a gloomy houses visited by a stranger, the frail mental and physical condition of the inhabitants, the motifs of painting, the gradually discovered history of the locations, hiding some dark tragedy and, above all, the underground part of the building, inhabited by spectral female figures demanding justice for the wrongs suffered. The ghostly perspective allows us to distinguish in the construction of the presented world the traumatic moment when the ghost has been born (the story of the haunted palace, Marianna’s tragedy), the place haunted by it (the catacombs of the estate, the basement of the block of flats) and the type of manifestation of the ghostly figure (vampiric Lady Usher, beautiful Marianna) along with the way it affects the characters (apparent madness, apathy, the motif of surviving the night). The endings of both works are parallel, when the buildings tremble in their foundations, and also by symbolical union of the Usher twins, that in Miłoszewski’s text.

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