Bene nati w interpretacji plastycznej Piotra Stachiewicza

The author describes the underappreciated, artistically innovative illustrations that Piotr Stachiewicz created for a jubilee edition of Bene Nati, which had been issued to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Eliza Orzeszkowa’s work as a writer in 1891. The author emphasizes the variety of Stachiewicz’s illustrations which portray the novel’s storyline, dramatic and genre scenes, characters and a winter landscape. These differ in format as well as the way in which they are integrated into the text and in which the images’ borders, which perform an interpretive function, are treated. When a border is interrupted and an illustration encroaches on the space that was intended for text, this means overstepping the boundaries of the fictional world and entering the real world. A reference to Andriolli’s illustrations brings to mind the world that was created in Pan Tadeusz [Sir Thaddeus] and constitutes a form of Aesopian language.