Zmory „teraźniejszego wieku” na seansie spirytystycznym Wokół „Trapezologionu” Józefa Ignacego Kraszewskiego
Nightmares of “the Present Age” at a Spiritist Seance: Around Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s "Trapezologion"

Summary/Abstract: The first part of this essay reconstructs the history of the birth and the initial development phase of modern spiritism (in the United States, Europe), its relation to akin ideas and notions remaining in a popular literary-scientific circulation of the romantic thought (spiritism vs. spiritualism; reincarnation; metempsychosis; mediumism; magnetism; wonder). The second, core part is based upon Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s ‘anecdote’ titled Trapezologion, written in 1855 and composed as a record of a spiritist seance at a provincial Polish manor, and forming a sort of transcripts of the confession of seven quasi-spirits doing penance for their sins and declaiming from various parts of the table. Already at the beginning of his story, as well as in a critical essay "Spirytyzm"[‘Spiritism’], published a few years later, Kraszewski remarks his distance toward the ‘tablemania’ disseminated in America and Europe at the time. The ‘anecdote’ ends with unmasking it as an act of quackery of a certain Nieklaszewicz, ventriloquist, one of those attending the seance, who made use of the opportunity to unveil the dark aspects of the nobility’s and magnates’ life. As depicted by Kraszewski, spiritism was a punishment imposed on the age of incredulity and materialism, a caricature of super-mundane longings of the people trammelled with the bondage of reason and exaggerated rationality.

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