„Wzniosłootępiałość” w kodach żałobnych po powstaniu styczniowym na przykładzie cyklu Wojna Artura Grottgera
“Stuplimity” in Mourning Codes after the January Uprising: Artur Grottger’s Series War

Summary/Abstract: In her famous book Ugly Feelings (2005), American culture critic and literary scholarSianne Ngai examines frowned upon affects such as jealousy, anxiety, irritation, andparanoia. According to Ngai, these “ugly feelings” provide no catharsis but, instead, tendto linger. In the context of nineteenth-century emotionality studies, the neologism“stuplimity” seems especially useful. Described as “a strange amalgamation of shockand boredom,” stuplimity combines pity and fear that find no discharge and turn intoa stupor. The emotion becomes an aesthetic category that we can find in Polish customsand art developed after 1864, in reaction to the fall of the Jauary Uprising, which peoplewere forbidden to openly articulate at the time. While the “black carnival” of pre-uprisingnational mourning showed the character of a dynamic performance, after the uprising’sdefeat – censored by tsarist authorities – mourning codes transformed into a longlastingmode of repressed despair. Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, the exampleof Artur Grottger’s series War (1866–1867) demonstrates how post-January trauma andthe indescribable cruelty of repressions became universalized and framed within allegory.The shock of defeat and the boredom of censorship culminated in a classicizing, academicaesthetics of stuplimity, which operated with pathos, generalization, and repetition.In a way, War constitutes Grottger’s attempt at an emotional self-portrait. Finished shortlybefore his death, the series’ biographical context complements these findings.

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