„To rzecz ludzka...”. O albumie dla Teodora Jełowickiego

Abstrakt

The article is concerned with the album of Norwid's paintings that the poet presented to Teodor Jełowicki in 1874. At the beginning the author tries to point to the variety seen in those works, in the range of both the materials and techniques that are used and in the subjects and motifs. He demonstrates differences and incoherencies in particular works not only because of reliability of the scholarly description of phenomena, but also as a provocation that makes one ask the question about ‘the whole’ which was a category very important to Norwid. All these actions are supposed to prove the fact that the works included in the album are not only connected with one another because they are put – maybe by chance – in one collection and that an arbitrary decision made by the donor and executor was the only basis for their choice.

The quality that unites all the works is their figurativeness. And hence it is not far to the statement that the protagonist – to use a literary term – of all the works is man. Certainly it is not really a revelation to allege such an intention to Norwid. In fact every work created by him is concerned with this issue. The author of the article stresses that the anthropological reference system appears in a definite shape in the album, and the cyclical character of the collection is formed not by concentration but rather by diffusion; by undertaking different subjects and taking different approaches, by freedom in connecting works and by bluntly passing from one subject to another. Norwid shows the protagonist, it seems, in two extreme dimensions: seriousness and comicalness, finality and temporality, perfection and futility, magnitude and mediocrity. These extremes point to a dynamic vision of man that – full of contradictions and internal antinomies – finds a deep justification in the paradoxical need to simultaneously elucidate various aspects of life.