Death and Birth: Paradoxes of Encounter. Three Epitaphs of Wacław Potocki

Abstract

The author analyzes three epitaphs belonging to the collection The Unweeded Garden by Potocki. It was written on the death of newborn and unborn children: To a Baby in Nappies, To a Foetus who Died with his Mother, and To a Foetus who Died in the Living Mother. Radosław Grześkowiak describes first their position among other very numerous epitaphs, all of them written by the author of The Garden. Then he notices how the tombstone devoted to dead children reveal the attitude of 17th-century people towards childhood. This attitude, slowly but surely, differs from the cool neutrality of the previous centuries. Eventually, the author shows the conceptual game of paradoxes to which Potocki was inspired by the very theme of the death of the unborn.