Romantyczna „choroba na śmierć”
Romantic “sickness unto death”

Author(s): Andrzej Fabianowski
Subject(s): Cultural history
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: suicide in Romanticism; logosphere; Johann Wolfgang Goethe; Heinrich von Kleist; Adam Mickiewicz; Juliusz Słowacki; Zygmunt Krasiński; Julian Ordon; Michał Czajkowski
Summary/Abstract: Romanticism brought a previously unknown identification of the fate of a literary hero and a real human being. The phenomenon of suicide in the Romantic era must therefore take into account the suicide written into literary fiction and the real one. The reason for the young people’s suicide was a feeling of deep alienation, a split between the idealistic image of the world and its true form. The impossibility of fulfilling ideal love, political oppression, and finally the feeling of being lost most often pushed young desperate people into the arms of death. But older people also made suicide decisions. Most often, the source of this decision was the inability to realize one’s own existential project in a world where there was no room for individualism. The inability to express themselves, the end of the logosphere, was synonymous with their decision to commit suicide. Romantic suicide was not the end of life, it expressed hope for a transition to a better world, friendly to human feelings and truth.

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