A Discreet Charm of the Roman Interior. On the Living Interiors in Cyprian Norwid’s Quidam (transl. by Tadeusz Karłowicz)

Abstract

The action of Norwid's poem Quidam takes place in Rome in Emperor Hadrian's times. The topographic realia of the city, however, do not occupy much space in the text of the work. There are no descriptions of monumental elegant edifices, temples, town squares, or indeed of the way the Roman street looked like. The houses, in which the protagonists' life goes on, are the only exception in this respect; the author made them the background for the events taking place in the poem.

The article is an attempt at reconstructing the actual look of Roman houses, in which a lot of scenes that are key ones in the course of the action of the poem take place: of the villas belonging to Artemidor and to Jason Mag, of Sophia's house and of Alexander's son's tenement flat. On the basis of analysis of fragments of Norwid's text that made for these reconstructions, also the specificity was determined of the descriptions of living interiors that consist of a fragmentary character and chariness of the description, privacy and subjective treatment of the scenes, and most of all of emphasizing the function of light in constructing the image of the presented world. In Quidam the author presents an exceptional abundance of observations about light, and the meaning of the motif of light and shadow in the poem exceeds the composition significance discussed in the article and heads for evaluating-symbolic functions.

The choice and arrangement of elements that make up the poetic images of interiors in the poem is conditioned, on the one hand by the narration strategy accepted by the author, where the perspective of narrator-witness dominates, and on the other by the specificity of a two-pole relation: man - interior. Both issues are given independent paragraphs in the article, an to conclude the considerations of living spaces attention is paid to the feature that is a peculiar distinctive one for the way the world is presented on the pages of Quidam. What is meant here is a clear turn to the peripheral sphere, additionally reinforced by raising the rank of the role that the fragment plays, which makes Norwid's poem appear to the reader as marked with the mystery of the interior, the person, the city.