Bezsenność Sebyły
Sebyła’s Sleeplessness

Author(s): Joanna Kisiel
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Studies of Literature, Polish Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: Various interpretations of Sebyła’s poetry constantly emphasize the nocturnal dominant of his works. Darkness and night constitute the usual settings in Sebyła’s poems,as well as the central categories of his poetic imagination. The following article points to a hitherto undiscovered possibility of reading this nocturnal poetry in the context of the notion of sleeplessness, as an account of the torment of the body and mind deprived of sleep. In Sebyła’s poetry, sleepless vigilance exposes the absurdity of existence and the longing for a reprieve from the nightmare of being. The night, overwhelmed with waking consciousness, does away with individuality; instead, it can be characterized by its universal, anonymous, cosmic dimension. The experience of sleeplessness in Sebyła’s poetry, similarly to Emmanuel Lévinas’s theories, reveals the tragic nature of life, caused not so much by the fear of death, but rather by the dread of being, the terror of one’s existence.

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