Wyobraźnia akwatyczna Mickiewicza

Abstract

The book is an attempt at describing Mickiewicz’s poetic imagination. The description was performed through the prism of aquaticity owing to the fact that water is a mother environment of the poet’s imagination. Water is widely perceived here — as an element of the world (pictures of the water) and as water images creating different spheres of reality. The methodological inspiration were on the one hand, Eliade’s phenomenology of symbols and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, and on the other, thematic criticism (Bachelard, Starobinski, Poulet). The imagination is treated here as a primary reality, superior — „deep structure” spreading inside and across Mickiewicz’s productions and creating their poetic world as a whole. From the presented point of view the imagination is characterized not only by an ability to create pictures but also by a special way of perceiving, feeling and experiencing the reality constituting the essence of poetry. The primary character of imagination was reflected in a kind of description: it and its particular aspects conditioned the construction of reasoning. Therefore, particular works appear in different chapters — every time in a plane of different aspect of imagination in which new senses were interpreted. When taking into account the level of description the integrality of compositions was preserved in such a situation when the elements of images included in them are so inseparably connected with the interpretation of the whole that they would be not understandable without it. The textual interpretation constitutes an introductory phase enabling the existence of the poetic world as a whole in which the „deep structure” was looked for. In the second phase the investigation based on intense „listening into” an internal shape of imagination, following its basic outline and incessant metamorphoses. The poetic Mickiewicz’s imagination was examined by means of the analyses of succeeding levels of aquaticity. In the first part there were presented the crucial aspects of aquatic symbolism (the structure of aquatic sacrum, symbolism of evil and absolution, symbolic shapes of time and eternity), its participation in creating Mickiewicz’s imagination due to the consolidation of universal realities of religion and myth in a sacred dimension. The prophetic basis of the symbolism pointed out a range of research in this part. The second part included the interpretation of aquatic imagination of forms: the analysis of action of aquatic shapes (phenomena of anticipation of forms, their metamorphoses), the general description of basic aquatic forms („space”, „source” and „cascade”) constituting Mickiewicz’s poetic imagination and finally, the extraction, description and interpretation of mythical-poetic shapes — the medium of symbolic dimension acquired by creating the intrapoetic code of signs-images (shapes connecting into series expressing symbolic senses vividly and deepening and widening the sphere of crucial textual contents) — not by referring to sacred prophecies. In the last part while concentrating on Mickiewicz’s material imagination there was showed how the aquatidty organizes and penetrates the world of Pan Tadeusz as a whole; the „struggle of matter” conducted in the masterpiece and the phenomenon of transformation of beings (revealing transcendence) — crucial for Mickiewicz’s poetry were presented. The mechanism of symbolic metamorphoses was used in the interpretation of the late poet’s lyrics — it shows how the poet creates the outline of new model of poetic picture in them.