Cudzoziemka Marii Kuncewiczowej: literacko-muzyczny dialog z przeszłością
Foreigner by Maria Kuncewiczowa: Literary-musical dialogue with the past

Summary/Abstract: Cudzoziemka (The Foreigner) by Maria Kuncewiczowa is a novel inspired by the author’s settlements with the past, an attempt to put in order difficult emotions pushed back into the subconscious. The story of a musical career of Róża Żabczyńska and her daughter Marta constitutes the transposition of the relationship between Maria Kuncewiczowa and her mother. Music is the common denominator combining the biography of Kuncewiczowa and the fate of the eponymous protagonist of the novel. She is one of the main themes of the novel, however, the correspondence between music and literature is also present in the formal level of the work. According to critics, commencing from the first review of the authorship of Bruno Schulz, The Foreigner is inspired by the form of a fugue, in which the subject of Rose’s psyche and the counter-subject of her metamorphosis are realized on two distinct time plans of the novel. The music composition pattern and the plot strictly related to the music, enveloped around two most important works: the Brahms’s violin concerto in D Major and Schumann’s song Ich grolle nicht, constitute two corresponding levels of the senses of the story, being the sign of their semantic compilation, also compared to the multi-faceted structure of a dream or a symphony.

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