Alina kontra Balladyna. Tragizm antybaśni ukrytej za baśniową scenerią dramatu Juliusza Słowackiego
Alina versus Balladyna. The tragic of the anti‑tale behind the fairy‑tale scenery of Juliusz Słowacki’s drama

Author(s): Joanna Sapa
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Studies of Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: The article attempts to analyse Balladyna by Juliusz Słowacki in terms of its intertextual references to popular tales by the Brothers Grimm: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood, and to two Ukrainian folk tales: Daughter and Stepdaughter and How the Emperor Married an Orphan Girl Maryjka. The main aim of this analysis is to discuss the analogies between the genre of tale and that of drama, visible in the structure of particular characters, and to identify the contradictory aesthetic categories which determine the text reception: the comic and the (dominant) tragic. The conclusions are as follows: firstly, Balladyna features a mixture of dramatic and fairy‑tale elements. Secondly, it is a two‑plane text, which can be read as a tale on the one hand, and as an anti‑tale on the other. Thirdly, the dominant aesthetic category here is the tragic. This final conclusion can be related to the question – very important in the Polish culture – whether a Pole has the right to laugh, especially at a time of national bondage, and to the nineteenth century sense of the tragic, which turned this category into a permanent element of the Romantic image of the world.

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