„Wieść o strasznych i dziwnych wypadkach w Żwirowie”. Gotycyzm „Zaklętego dworu” Walerego Łozińskiego

Abstrakt

The Accursed Mansion by Walery Łoziński (1859) is a major modification of the Gothic convention in the Polish novel prose of the XIX century. The author moves the plot from a distant or imaginary story into the time of the reader. The exotic of place is substituted with a colourless and provincial locality. He simplifies the thriller plot developing at the same time the factor of the rational secret regarding the process of building knowledge of the portrayed reality. He leaves the stereotype of a Gothic villain on the shelf and focuses on sociological and ethnological reasons for human hatred and revenge. The typical place of action − an ancient castle − transforms into a nobleman’s manor, an archetype of the Polish home. But he makes the motif of the supernatural being in the form of spectre the most important element of the paraphrase of classic Gothicism. The ancient stranger from the beyond becomes ultimately, after the stage of pseudofantastic masquerade, a human phantom, who has renounced his humanity for the benefit of the absolute of the conspiracy. What terrifies on the pages of the Accursed Mansion, seems to be a Gothic allegory of a conspirator, a human incarnation of inhumanly understood ideology. The Gothicism in the Accursed Mansion is not only a symbolic costume and a metaphor of the conspirational attitude, as the former interpreters liked to see it, but also an axiological dimension of the romantic thought on the national independence.