(In)sincerity as a narrative strategy in Karol Irzykowski’s “Sny Marii Dunin. Palimpsest”
(In)sincerity as a narrative strategy in Karol Irzykowski’s “Sny Marii Dunin. Palimpsest”

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on Karol Irzykowski’s novella “Sny Marii Dunin. Palimpsest” (The dreams of Maria Dunin. Palimpsest, 1903) in relation to the author’s understanding of the concept of sincerity. The novella provides several examples of rhetorical (in)sincerity: the untrustworthiness of the narrator, the liar’s paradox, and the motif of the palimpsest-mystification. Drawing on Magdalena Popiel’s distinction between intellectual and emotional modernist sincerity, and her assertion that Irzykowski is a leading representative of the former, as well as on Irzykowski’s well-documented polemical stance towards the Młoda Polska (Young Poland) movement, the study argues that the novella can be read as an ironic commentary on emotional modernist sincerity and symbolist aesthetics.

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