Obraz czarnego słońca w wybranych utworach francuskich i polskich romantyków (rekonesans)
The image of black sun in selected texts of Polish and French romantics (reconnaissance) .

Summary/Abstract: The article’s goal is an inquiry into the main contexts, in Polish and French Romanticism, for the metaphor of black sun; the metaphor belongs with images and themes clearly marked by the experience of melancholia. There was also a significant impact of astronomical fantasies which, perhaps surprisingly, were very popular in Romanticism. Another important reference point for the present text analysis is the Biblical tradition (related mainly to Old Testament books and The Revelation). However, it must be stressed that the popularity of the metaphor of black sun, both in France and in Poland, was undoubtedly fostered by the popularity of Dürer’s print Melancholia I, and Jean-Paul Richter’s famous Speech of the Dead Christ. In works by selected authors, who represent the two language areas under discussion (including Gautier, Nerval, Słowacki, and Krasiński), it is possible to notice significant differences, which allow for asserting the existence of a different model of dissemination of the image of black sun. Inasmuch as French Romantics mostly approach the image in aesthetic and existential terms, the Polish authors clearly focus on metaphysical and historiographical approaches. It is also important that contrary to Biblical sources, where the image of black sun was often related to God’s wrath or his intervention in earthly order, as in Last Judgement, and contrary to astronomical sources, which eliminated individual perspective and clearly strived for objective approach, the metaphor of black sun in texts by Romantic authors is mostly of anthropological quality; it is an image of the human being confronted by individually experienced transience (in the existential model, closer to French Romantics), or in confrontation with time of a community (historiosophic model, which dominates in texts by Polish Romantics).

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