Słowo i prawda w powieści Wiesława Myśliwskiego "Kamień na kamieniu"
Word and truth in Wiesław Myśliwski's novel "Stone on stone"

Summary/Abstract: The word and truth philosophy hidden in the novel Kamień na kamieniu [Stone upon Stone] references the principles of oral culture. The author consciously, through mouths of his characters, delivers a peculiar lecture on word and truth, scored for many episodes – a treatise with a mindset rooted in the folk, pre-writing way of understanding of reality. In Myśliwski’s oral world, the know-ledge of the meaning of words is tantamount to the knowledge of the principles of existence among people. Under Myśliwski’s approach, tale telling is a kind of a spiritual journey to the most primordial existential experiences. The basic function of a word becomes the unveiling of the existential worry. Speech turns out to be a vehicle bringing out from human beings what really connects them. It is only the revealed worry that removes the obstacles separating the participants of a conversation, unveils their deepest identity and their common human fate. For the novel’s narrator, understanding is a kind of a final existential opening to the Other, is a co-experiencing of the Other. The hero of Myśliwski’s novel values the myth of himself in accordance with the standards of the oral culture. He seems to regard the flat reality of facts as less valuable than the information from the sphere of axiology and existence. To him, the message of a myth is a truth much more important than the truth of events.

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