Ignacy Dąbrowski. Życie i twórczość w cieniu Śmierci
Ignacy Dąbrowski: life and work in the shadow of Death

Author(s): Jadwiga Goniewicz-Potocka
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts, Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
Keywords: Ignacy Dąbrowski; the writer’s archive; manuscripts; Young Poland; 19th-century Polish prose
Summary/Abstract: This study is dedicated to the life and work of Ignacy Dąbrowski (1869–1932) – one of the most recognisable Polish prose writers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and author of the acclaimed novel Śmierć (1892). The aim of this thesis is to reconstruct the writer’s biography and provide a comprehensive overview of his works, together with an analysis of their reception from the 19th to the 21st century. The thesis stated in the title highlights the dual significance of the motif of death in Dąbrowski’s biography and work – both as a personal experience and as a literary phenomenon that came to dominate his subsequent writing. His work is presented as a process shaped by the experience of loss, and the writer’s biography becomes the key to interpreting his prose.The study employs a hermeneutic perspective, as well as biographical and archival methods, and textual genetics. The subsequent chapters present three stages of Dąbrowski’s creative output – the period as a private tutor (1888–1897), the Italian period (1898–1904) and the Warsaw period (1905–1929) – analysing the evolution of his style and themes within a historical, social and philosophical context. A significant part of the thesis consists of a chronology of his life and work, a bibliography and an archive containing correspondence and a detailed description of the surviving autographs.The thesis’s conclusions emphasise the introspective nature of Dąbrowski’s prose, whose central themes – transience, loneliness, trauma and the search for identity – stem from his personal experiences, particularly his loss of parents. The writer regarded his creative work as a form of self-therapy and an attempt to reconcile his own ‘self’. The analysis presents Dąbrowski as an original figure of the Young Poland movement, whose work constitutes a coherent reflection on human existence and the fragility of life.

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