Człowiek w teatrze kultury - o "Królu Obojga Sycylii" Andrzeja Kuśniewicza

The article consists a proposal of an interpretation, from anthropological point of view, of one of the best known Andrzej Kuśniewicz’s novel - The King of the Both Sicilias. The entrance point of the article is a believe in a ballad-like character of the Kuśniewicz’s work. The novel was given a name of a “ballad about a dead kingdom” on one of it’s last pages. Kazimierz Wyka called The King of the Both Sicilias “the emperor’e and the king’s ballad-like novel”. Following this track Elżbieta Dutka recognises in this book a predominance of drama elements and the presence of theatre plots. A specific narration makes it possible to distinguish the two different spheres: a public and private one. The first mentioned area is connected with the world presented in the novel - the picture of Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and Vienna at the turn of the century and the beginning of the World War I. At the public surface of the Kuśniewicz’s novel, the artificiality of live, that creates a condition for culture to become a certain kind of a theatre is exposed. In the same time, the way of construction of the main character as an artist, taking a role of a decadent, an unhappy lover of his own sister and an accidental murder of a young Gipsy-girl, brings into a mind an idea that was developed by Józef Tischner - the concept of human as a drama-being