Jerzy Stempowski and Existential-Eschatological Interpretation of Alexander Fredro’s Comedy «Mr Jowialski»

Abstract

The article analyzes the philosophical and aesthetic problems of Jerzy Stempowski's essay «Mr Jowialski and His Heirs» in the cultural and historical context of the Interwar period. The author defines the place of the considered essay in Stempowski’s works. The article also reveals that there are important issue-based connections with other samples of the writer's essayism, the conceptual idea of which is the comprehension of existence through the library. The author explains the mechanism of «misreading» in Fredro's comedy «Mr Jowialski», which involves making distant analogies between Mr Jowialski, various images from literary classics (the heroes from the novel «A rebóurs» by Huysmans and Shakespeare’s drama «The Tempest») and historical figures (emperor Caligula). The latter analogy reveals сommon ground between Stempowski's essay and Camus's later drama «Caligula». It is concluded that Stempowski interprets Fredro's comedy «Mr Jowialski» as an existential-eschatological drama of the absurd, which, of course, differed from the author's intention of writing a comedy.