Nieznośna kruchość bytu – literatura Młodej Polski wobec chorób ciała i ducha
The Unbearable Fragility of Being: The Nineteenth-Century Representations of the Bodily Illness and Spiritual Maladies in Polish Literature

Summary/Abstract: The end of the nineteenth century was marked by a strangely affirming attitude to disabilities, diseases, and bodily deformities. From the Romantics, the artists of the Young Poland movement inherited a fascination with tuberculosis amounting to the mythologization of the sick; tuberculosis, or the “white plague,” was one of the favourite themes of the modernist studies of human disability and mortality. The turn of the century was also a time of extensive research into mental diseases. The naturalists, for that matter, equipped the great prose writers of the Belle Epoque with the medical conceptual apparatus and developed a sophisticated language of “clinical literature.” This article, focusing on several literary works representative of the Young Poland movement, strives to explain how, at the turn of the century, the experience of illness influenced the texts of culture and, vice versa, how literature shaped the understanding of illness.

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