Gdy debiut staje się podzwonnym. Melancholia Pamiątek Soplicy
When the Debut Becomes a Death Knell: The Melancholy of Pamiątki Soplicy [The Memoirs of Soplica]

Summary/Abstract: Węgrzyn proposes a new reading of Henryk Rzewuski’s Pamiątek Soplicy [The Memoirs of Soplica, 1839] as a recording of a melancholy becoming-aware of the decline of traditional noble culture in the nineteenth century. While Rzewuski’s contemporaries read his gawęda as a ritualised commemoration and attempt to reintegrate the community, his work lost its readability for later generations and became no more than a “picturesque” tale about a Sarmatian past. Questions of the performativity of the gawęda, its genre relationships and its oral roots all have a common denominator – melancholy. This allows Węgrzyn to shed light on the paradoxes linked with the character of Rzewuski-Soplica and to capture the ambivalent status of the Romantic gawęda which tries to recreate the identity of the oral noble gawęda in writing.

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