‘Subsequent Spirituality’ and Emotional Kitsch-Spheres in Two Literary Depictions (Irzykowski – Dehnel)

Abstract

The author of the article examines a phenomenon associated with a certain – today increasingly common – attitude in life that may be described, in most simple terms, as the marriage of non-authenticity with imitationism. The author focuses her attention on feelings of love (as particularly ‘acute’ and, at the same time, probably most mythologized), or rather on their literary depiction, which allows for an accurate diagnosis of the sensitivity typical of a consumer society obsessed with money, subject to the dictates of mass media and under pressure from the ideals and ideas of pop culture. A diagnosis of this kind comes in the form of Jacek Dehnel’s short story Miłość korepetytora (The Private Tutor’s Love) which, together with three other stories, comprises the volume Balzakiana (Balzaciennes) (2008). The young Polish writer, attempting to diagnose the condition of the Polish society after the political transformation of 1989, makes a conscious reference to the distant tradition of realistic prose from the legacy of Honoré de Balzac. As for the review of the sphere of individual feelings and emotions falsified by various stereotypes and abstract ideas, one can also look to a tradition closer to Dehnel: namely the only novel of Karol Irzykowski entitled Pałuba (The Hag) (1903). The author of the article shows some similarities between the Young Poland concept of ‘successive-world phenomena’ and the contemporary vision of determining the emotional sphere through pop culture templates with the underlying experience of romantic elation. References to the diagnoses of Abraham Moles, Milan Kundera and Hermann Broch allow for highlighting the issues of ‘exaltation as a replacement of spirituality’ and kitsch as ‘our daily aesthetic and morality’.