Proza Leopolda Méyeta. Część I: Nowele
Leopold Méyet’s prose works. Part I: Short stories

Summary/Abstract: This article is focused around the short-story output of a Warsaw-based attorney, editor, bibliophile, man-of-letters, collector, and philanthropist – viewed in the context of his biography. Méyet was friends with the cultural celebrities of the late 19th/early 20th century. Scholars are particularly attracted by the form that Méyet’s friendship with Eliza Orzeszkowa assumed, which can be read today through their exchanged correspondence. The theme of the short stories in question is problematisation of the notion of love – its nature, complexity, quality, and forms in which it is realised. With reference to certain formal solutions used, conforming to the nineteenth-century short-story poetics, Méyet tries to prove that there are no simple answers and that passions and sentiments or affections cannot possibly be enclosed in a mathematical algorithm. Analysed in the article, Méyet’s short-story pieces – although they did not trigger a literary revolution, if they were noticed at all – come out as a clear sign of a need to create something original emerging in a man who happened to live through achievements of the others but also, for the others.

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