Pursuing the Past: Hunting in Józef Weyssenhoff’s The Sable and the Girl

Abstract

The article investigates Józef Weyssenhoff’s novel The Sable and the Girl (Polish: Soból i panna) published in 1911. The name of its author is rarely mentioned when discussing the Polish literature of the late 19th and early 20th century. Most literary critics agree, however, that the signature feature in Weyssenhoff’s works is his poetic descriptions of nature and hunting, especially in aforementioned work. The article analyses the interplay of Lithuanian and Polish cultures in this text as well as its Lithuanian literary geography. The question is raised as to what cultural and literary meanings might have been concentrated in the novel at the turn of the 20th century, and what Polish-Lithuanian cultural connections were revealed due to it. The article introduction offers a brief overview of the changes in depicting hunting in Western literature and cultural tradition, and considers to what extent those insights are still valid when analysing the works of various authors attributed to and impacted by the legacy of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The article further traces the competing plots of love and hunting in Weyssenhoff’s novel, and the writer’s ambition to employ the symbol of the lost world – hunting. A combination of extratextual references, internal textual relations, and detectable intertexts has been employed to interpret the novel; therefore, when delving into the development of the narrative, none of the theories (e.g., intertextuality) is clearly dominant. When discussing The Sable and the Girl in the Lithuanian cultural field, the historical contexts of the early 20th century Russian Empire, the intertexts of Polish literary tradition as well as the concept of hunting and a colonial look at the sociocultural environment where the narrative is developed remain of similar significance.