Dwie śmierci upiora. O końcu fantastyki na przykładzie polskiej prozy fantastycznej połowy XIX wieku
Two Deaths of a Ghost

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the article is to examine how the figure of a revenant evolved in Polish Romantic literature. The author juxtaposes short stories from the 1830s (Romantyk [The Romantic] by Lucjan Siemieński and Opowiadanie nieboszczyka [The Dead Man’s Story] by Kazimierz Wójcicki) with those from the 1850s and 1860s (Dwie siostry [Two Sisters] by Michał Bałucki, Śliska do przepaści droga [A Slippery Road to the Abyss] by Józef Dzierzkowski and Smętarz [Cemetery] by Antoni Pietkiewicz). The comparison shows how conventional and clichéd the motif of a revenant became. This was due to the overexploitation and omnipresence of this figure in Romantic literature and also the birth of modern psychology and the ongoing debate over unconsciousness. Consequently, in 1860, a revenant was treated as an ostentatious metaphor of the unconscious. The author discusses the conventionalisation of the motif of a revenant in the context of both the development of psychology in Polish lands (primarily in Feliks Szokalski’s work) and the evolution of the fantastic as a genre (according to Tzvetan Todorov’s theory claiming that psychoanalysis killed the fantastic).

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