“Lizards like flames”, “alleys like ravines”. From the ocularcentrism to anti-visuality of the series From the Italian Impressions by Władysław Reymont

Abstract

The article discusses a series of travel texts by Władysław Reymont entitled From the Italian Impressions. The starting point for the author of the article is the clearly defined motivation behind Reymont’s journey, namely the desire to escape the routine of everyday life and, at the same time, to seek new stimuli and inspiration for his novels. The series entitled From the Italian Impressions describes an unusual pilgrimage characterised by haste and fast traveling by train. Reymont is a modern tourist, balancing between an attempt to grasp the whole and contemplation of the small and specific. The author notes that the veristically oriented Reymont, through the narrative framework of Young Poland, achieved an effect of plasticity and kinetic nature of his descriptions of spaces and landscapes. He saw the painterly, theatrical and cinematographic potential of the phenomena he observed: people, nature and works of art. Reymont’s images of Italy come to life, but sometimes it is unclear whether they are still external images or already the author’s inner world. From the Italian Impressions can be treated as an illustration of Henri Bergson’s statement: “The mechanism of our cognition is cinematographic in nature” (ibid., Creative Evolution). The Italian cycle was first published in ‘Gazeta Polska’ in 1895, and subsequently by Adam Grzymała-Siedlecki in the eighth volume of Letters: From the Polish and Italian Land in 1925.