A Poetic Death — the Literary Images of Suicidal Deaths in the Literature of Nineteenth Century

There exists something like beautiful life. Is it possible to die beautifully? Is there a beauty that can be related to something as terrifying as suicidal dying? The study presents attempts of making the death poetic by the characters that emerged in opuses of the authors of the nineteenth century. The paper shows the reasons why these characters tried to die in a sophisticated way, which cannot be trivial at all. The author of this study attempts to explain why they make their death look like a performance. And the number of viewers is not the most important issue they are worrying about. What is really meaningful is to tear the constraints which are imposed by society, culture, people’s demands and to achieve the liberation from life’s and death’s schemes. The main premise of the paper is that, for all characters, the suicidal death is most of all the manifestation of their own need to decise about themselves and to explore an art in every detail of people’s existence. The discussed phenomena are illustrated in the novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz, Gabriela Zapolska and Włodzimierz Perzyński.Udostępnienie publikacji Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego finansowane w ramach projektu „Doskonałość naukowa kluczem do doskonałości kształcenia”. Projekt realizowany jest ze środków Europejskiego Funduszu Społecznego w ramach Programu Operacyjnego Wiedza Edukacja Rozwój; nr umowy: POWER.03.05.00-00-Z092/17-00