Chłopomania, czyli lek na całe zło (interpretacja powieści "Bajecznie kolorowa" Ignacego Maciejowskiego)

Abstrakt

This article offers a scholarly interpretation of the novel "Bajecznie kolorowa" (1898) by Ignacy Sewer Maciejowski, a now largely forgotten writer who is usually omitted from surveys and collections on 19th-century Polish literature. Wacek, a Young Poland painter and the novel’s protagonist, gradually turns into a weary, apathetic decadent, deprived of motivation for creative work. He regains his vital energy and inner harmony after meeting the charming Jagusia – the daughter of a peasant from Bronowice. Significantly, Bajecznie kolorowa can be read as a prose portrait of Włodzimierz Tetmajer and Anna Mikołajczykówna, whose marriage was famously depicted three years later in The Wedding by Stanisław Wyspiański. In my analysis, I define peasantomania not only as a cultural trend of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also as a hygienic phantasm – an attempt by the artistic community to restore mental and physical (affective) balance. I argue that this movement emerged as a response to the existential maladies of the modernists, who sought in rustic life a universal antidote to the pervasive Weltschmerz. At the same time, I draw attention to the unwarranted mythologization of the countryside and its inhabitants, portrayed in an overly simplified and idyllic manner. The text under analysis thus reveals the tensions between the literary vision of peasantomania and the real social and health problems of the fin de siècle.