The sources and functions of turpistic imagery in Zygmunt Krasiński’s poem Do... (Przekleństwo podłym – przekleństwo tej babie)

Abstract

The article is an attempt to analyse the poem with reference to its connection with tradition and implications of this relation. The author reconstructs the map of biographical impulses which contributed to the creation of the poem and portrays its female protagonist, Zofia z Potockich Kisielewowa, seeking in the literary tradition sources of anti-aesthetic practices intentionally and consistently used by Krasiński. Moreover, the article presents previous applications of the literary topos of vetula – an archetypal character of an unlovable yet licentious old woman (the greatest popularity of the motif is connected with the literature of the Baroque period). The little-known poem can be analysed as a testimony of private sympathy or antipathy, inspiration and reading, but also as a proof of ethical and social views. The ideological layer of the work is based on the affirmation of the Platonic triad. However, the author adapts it with some modifications – in the place of good associated with beauty and truth he situates nobility opposed to meanness. In the first half of the nineteenth century both antonymic terms connoted two meanings: they referred to human morality and the man’s place in the social hierarchy.