„I tylko jedno jest zdarzenie: dworzec”. Dworzec w poezji Kazimierza Wierzyńskiego - motyw melancholii małomiejskiej

Abstrakt

The own, original, poetic definition of the province expressed by Kazimierz Wierzyński in the poem Dworzec (Station) from the volume Wróble na dachu (Sparrows on the Roof 1921). A station – window on the world, the source of melancholy for people from a provincial town. The image of ‘maidens who yearn from the empty platform, / from where the soul of the province and spleen blows’, for whom the direct contact with the train to Warsaw arriving once a day, is an ‘event'’, stimulates the imagination, and is an excuse for ‘the journey through fairytales’.

The image of ‘the strange world from the window of a carriage’: rectangular windows of the carriage, which could be perceived by maidens as a film frame or Warsaw glazed shop windows (illusion).

The question of ‘window shopping’ (lèche-vitrine) and ‘the defeat of yearning’ for the man, who cannot get to the other side of the glass and quench his own thirst or desire, and who deserves to be called ‘a melancholic Narcissist of consumerism’ [an expression coined by Marek Bieńczyk]. An image of a glass-reflected grimace on the face of the contemporary (modern) man – ‘one of the most melancholic allegories of a consumerist society’. References to the poem At the Main Station in Warsaw (1936) Pod dworcem głównym w Warszawie by Józef Czechowicz. Ambiguity of the English term ‘station’. The issue of crossing the social barrier (getting above your station). As well as the station as an element of the childhood land (Arcadia).

At the same time some philosophical questions are raised: The Journey of Odysseus (by Plato) and Abraham’s journey. The problem of ‘removing burden from the soul’ (Socrates), and one’s own transformations – negation of the journey, ‘flapping’ and ‘fleeing from oneself’.