Tren Chozroesa

Abstract

The author f th e article places The Word and the Flesh in the line with 3 masterpieces of Polish love literature: Jan Kochanowski’s Threnodies (Treny), Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady Part IV and Bolesław Prus’s The Doll (Lalka). A common place of all the works is an experience (which is recorded in the literary texts) of the absence of the love’s object. The speaking “I” of the elegiac lyrical poetry or the narrative knows, that once the love’s object is lost, it is lost forever, but despite that he challenges that loss: it is opposed with his tender memory and his work, which is the memory’s construction . The Osroes’s epistolary lament represents a complex of a gaper, who once overlooked the presence of being, and when he realises that, he can only be “a slave of his knowledge, memory and im agination ”. Parnicki uses Osroes’s love of Markia as an impulse to learn something about the past. Love in The Word and the Flesh has little in common with romance; it is not a kind of personal relation; it is a source of phenomenological approach to the past, an egoistic interest to envision what was lost and what we once loved. In The Word and the Flesh Parnicki proves, that without an affective attitude to a single existence, it slips into a sheer natural existence with out its own meaning.