Nowoczesny Orfeusz

Overview & Synopsis

The most famous novel by Stanisław Lem was based on the structure of the myth of Euridice and Orpheus. An enigmatic lyric by Aleksander Wat appears to be a brilliant grammar of creating a scene of losing Euridice anew. Czesław Miłosz is the author of one of the most revelatory readings of Orpheus’s story, and one that is typical of our ‘Secular Age’ at the same time. In her play written during World War II, Anna Świrszczyńska undertook an incorporation of the figure of Orpheus into the history of travel to the Hades: a hero of a community, deprived, up to that point, of his own storyline. The terminally ill Stanisław Wyspiański was also drafting a play about the hero; Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński mentioned similar plans in his notes from a prisoner-of-war camp. These are just examples of the surprisingly rich and varied Polish reception of the stories of the first artist, previously only studied to a lesser degree. This monograph is devoted to Polish literature of the last one hundred years, as well as the centuries-old history of the transformations of the Orpheus myth in Western art. In it, one can find a proposal of a mythological reading of works not directly related to the storyline, a reflection on the alternative history of its reception, as well as on the future fate of the topic. The text incorporates fifteen contextual fragments, pertaining to the key elements and classical realisations of the myth: these can be read in any order, as entries in a, previously inexistent, Orphean encyclopaedia.