„Niepokój, groza wieczności”. Taine czytany przez Schulza (próba lektury równoległej)

Abstrakt

There is only one published piece of evidence that Bruno Schulz read Taine: a note that he made in reference to Taine’s Philosophy of Art (pages 51-71 of volume II of the Polish 1911 Lviv edition). The note has been discovered almost miraculously and briefly commented on by Jerzy Jarzębski in 1995. In the present essay, the author approaches the note once more, reading it together with Taine’s book and treating Schulz’s text as an intellectual map to reconstruct the actual moment of the writer’s reading. It seems that there is some mental kinship between the French philosopher and the Polish writer: common fascination with ancient Greece and skepticism about the prospects of modern European civilization. Both compared the ancient and modern ideas of art and ways of everyday life, as well as pagan and post-Christian beliefs about death and afterlife.