Recepcja poematu Anhelli Juliusza Słowackiego w malarstwie Witolda Pruszkowskiego

The article concerns the way in which modernist painter Witold Pruszkowski (1846-1849) drew inspiration from the poem Anhelli (1837), a work of the romantic poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809-1849) treating on the fate of a group of Poles in Siberia, political exiles after the Polish-Russian war (1830-1831). The research shows that the painter refers to Anhelli to query about identity, individuality, belonging to the tradition, as well as about the purpose and the sense of art. In Pruszkowski’s paintings the space of the poem becomes a paysage intime, an inner, emotional space. The painter brings out the symbolic potential of the poem and concentrates on imaginative, colourful aspects of the romantic work. The main imaginative themes of his paintings cross the border between the human world and what lays beyond it, referring to such topics as death, ghosts and mysterious landscapes (downs, dusks). The world of the Anhelli poem becomes an integral part of the whole work of Pruszkowski.