Niewyrażone światło. O Demeter w opowiadaniu Biłek Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza
The Unexpressed Light. About Demeter in Jarosław Iwaszkiewiczʼs short story Biłek

Summary/Abstract: The story Biłek by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz (1894–1980), one of the most eminent Polish writers of the 20th century, deals with the problem of old age and death. The protagonists include an old horse called Biłek and his owner, old Ignacy. The author of the article does not agree with the view that in his story, the writer paints a pessimistic vision of human life in old age, which ends with an ontic nothingness upon death. He argues that in Biłek, Iwaszkiewicz (similarly as in his other greatest short stories) arranged in a masterly artistic way traces of the existence of the maternal Transcendence with the face of Demeter, the mythological Goddess of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life, resembling Karl Jaspers’s ciphers of Transcendence, on which the fragile hope for life after death can be based.

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