Pomnik chłopa – przystanki sensu, stacje rozpadu: Rozważania o pisaniu historii

The article deals with the relationship between the writing of history and the creation of allegories. The question of the contextual and creative nature of interpretation/organisation of meaning is placed at the centre of consideration. The starting point is the Albrecht Dürer’s Monument to Commemorate the Victory over the Rebellious Peasants woodcut – an example of an interpretative puzzle showing the discursive entanglements of interpreters. Through contemporary artistic references to the Dürer’s work, the phenomenon of a turn towards folk history is also presented. The analysis of the Daniel Rycharski’s mobile Pomnik Chłopa (Monument to a Peasant), inspired by the Dürer’s woodcut, which travels across Poland, aims at bringing closer the mechanism of creating connotational shifts and reflecting on the interpenetration and divergence of various ways of thinking about peasant history. Melancholy, to which Dürer and Rycharski refer in their works, is shown as a figure of the desire for meaning and the disintegration of meaning.