Między romansem a powieścią społeczną. Wokół wybranych elementów prozy Józefa Dzierzkowskiego

Abstract

The article discusses three novels written by J. Dzierzkowski in 1840s, i.e. Salon i ulica (The drawing room and the street), Kuglarze (The jugglers), Dla posagu (For a dowry). The writer follows the pattern of a modern French novel, like Balzac’s ones, proving that it is possible to use family relations as the basis of depicting the entire society. However, the final evaluation is a bitter moral judgment. Dierzkowski presents the family relations and the family as such, as the place of pain, a space where people suffer from humiliation, disastrous upbringing, demoralization and the lack of family warmth. He creates a severe satire of the province society. The reason for the demoralization is money that in Dzierzkowski’s novels gains the power of a fatal, even demonic, force. In the above-mentioned works, the role of the erotic thread is diminished for the sake of the structural elements taken from “mystery novels”. Nevertheless, Dzierzkowski attempts to adopt this genre and does not follow the radical direction by emphasizing the moral message simultaneously trying to present the anxious space of a big city (Lviv) and its enchanted corners.It is clearly visible, then, that Dzierzkowski’s novels from 1840s describe formal eclecticism. Finally, in spite of the presence of elements of a “mystery novel” as well as elements close to the frenetic Romantic novel, the most visible is the model of a social novel, which precedes the later Positivist tendentious novel.