Kolczasta sensualność. Miasto szwedzkich melancholików przełomu XIX i XX wieku
Thorny Sensuality. A City of Swedish Melancholics at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Summary/Abstract: The text shows the picture of nineteenth-century Stockholm saturated with negativecontent, revealing a large city as a space of deadness, chimerical vitalism, and unconditionaldissolution as a result of crisis of values. Symptomatic for the nineteenth-century Europeansocial changes made the literary city a reflection of this process by showing the urbanmonstrosity of that destructive energy, its unfriendliness and controversy. This case issimilar. The novelistic city shows multidimensional loneliness of man of that time. Thisimage maps the entity which is not able to save its subjectivity, to find the formula, theman who from the heights of his own selfishness precipitates his identity into the abyss ofall progression. It also shows the doom of rudimentary value, flattening of anthropocentricdimension of existence in favour of the eruption of animalistic instincts, impulses andconsumerism. The characters in Hjalmar Söderberg’s novel – Martin, Arvid, Gabriel orTomas – circulate in this space, wander, chase, roam the empty area looking for values. Thecharacters being in chronic pointless movement automatically include themselves in aninsensitive stream of street momentum, as they were passively involved in this wholetheatre of gestures. Stockholm is a symbol of the inertial city, neutral existentially, it isa braid of illusions, fantasies, afterimages. The city is a zone of axiological deadness,damages. A sad face of the city chronically becomes a grimace of everything that is wrong,hardening into the “damage”, closure. It is an unusual character of this prose.

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