Prawda czy mistyfikacja? „Czarna róża” Juliana Stryjkowskiego jako powieść z kluczem
Truth or Mistification? Julian Stryjkowski’s “Czarna róża [Black Rose]” as a Roman-à-Clef

Summary/Abstract: The article attempts at a new interpretation and recollection of already somewhat forgotten novel by Julian Stryjkowski “Czarna róża (Black Rose).” A thorough initial part contains the voices of reviewers and critics that decide about the novel’s controversial reception and about strenghtening its position as a social, political, as well as educational novel with elements of melodrama. The voices pointed at weak sides of the “passive” schematic protagonist, exploited the novel’s autobiographical layer from the angle of so-called ideological truth or historical truth, as Stryjkowski set the action in prewar Lviv working class society. At the same time, the novel’s level of responsibility was lost. The author proves that descerning a key hidden in the text’s deep structure, which encodes all its meanings, imposes on the reader firstly an effort to decipher the mythical matrix, i.e. seizing the elements of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice bound into the plot, and secondly grasping a set of allusive references to Zygmunt Krasiński’s “Undivine Comedy” which determine a peculiar reader-writer interplay. Not until confronted with those basic cultural texts, can the receiver interpret the novel in the mode consistent with the author’s intention, i.e. with Stryjkowski’s declaration of disillusionment with the communist ideology. The symbol of “black rose” stands for an attempt by a young, ambitious protagonist based on Count Henry at reaching the impossible, namely Tamara’s reciprocal love, a woman as much real as “virgin-dead”, an embodiment of cruel communist ideology. The process of reaching the truth is initiatory and indicates the protagonist’s stepping into deeper regions of Lviv hell, pictured nevertheless with realist reverence.

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