Między Nocą z 3-go na 4-ty Grudnia a Liściem akacji Walerego Przyborowskiego czyli początki polskiej powieści kryminalnej

Abstract

The article analyses three early novels by Walery Przyborowski, i.e. Noc z 3-go na 4-ty Grudnia (The Night from the 3rd to 4th December),Liść akacji (A leaf of Acacia) and Czerwona skrzynia (A Red Chest) and a novel published 5 years after the latter: Kwiat agawy (A flower of Agave). Written in the middle of the 1870s, the novels are the first examples of the Polish detective-crime genre. Przyborowski is a well-known author of historical novels for adolescents, whereas this aspect of his work is yet not explored. The first two novels realize the schema of a juridical investigation based on the crime scene evidence, documents, interrogations and “site inspection” in a closed and limited space. A Red Chest considerably extends the space of the action. It deals with tracking the conspirators, culprits who are on the move by an amateur agent who is driven by a personal motive – the desire to take revenge on the conspiracy organization for killing (only apparently as it turns out later on) his son. Stemming from the tradition of mystery and horror novels, Przyborowski’s books introduce elements of macabre and extraordinariness, however, they focus primarily on solving “the riddle” and discovering the motives of the crime. By introducing threads full of false trails, different hypotheses concerning the motive, and using retrospection the author gave the novel a structure similar to a “classical” model of a detective story (in its English and French version). The centre of gravity focuses on the amateur detective’s thinking process, discovery and creation of hypotheses about the motives of the crime and their verification. When the time of creation of the novels is concerned, they precede the works of William Collins, Émile Gaboriau and Conan Doyle.