„Poczciwy rydel!.. Służy mi godnie, kopie tu żwirek i kopie…” Figura grabarza w wybranych utworach literatury światowej

The figure of a gravedigger, rich in cultural meanings, has become a source of many literary inspirations. The most important works dealing with the theme of a gravedigger and gravedigging include William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet (the so-called graveyard scene), Rainer Maria Rilke’s short story The Gravedigger, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Mendel the Gravedigger, and the novels: The Gravedigger’s Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates, The Gravedigger by Peter Grandbois and Rozmowy na trzech grabarzy i jedną śmierć[Conversations for Three Gravediggers and One Death] by Tomasz Kowalski. The subject of the present study is the variety of creations of the gravedigger shown on the pages of selected works (their selection is the result of a deliberate decision of the author). Thus, the author’s interest focused on artistic representations of the digger as: a sage who possesses knowledge on the passing of time, inevitability of death and the process of thanatomorphose, a home-grown pathomorphologist and anatomist, a mocker and ironist who looks at death with a distance characteristic to himself, or even disregard, as well as an intermediary between the ordered world of the human ecumene and the undifferentiated area of the afterlife (the one who talks to the spirits of the dead and to Death itself). In the analysed works, as it has been shown in the course of the analysis, the “spade virtuoso” also appears as a man of the road, a visitor from nowhere, a scapegoat, a bearer of the plague, in one word, a demonic and alien being, subject to social exclusion and stigmatisation. Among the numerous creations of the performers of the “wicked profession”, the author distinguished also the figure of a merciful gravedigger who, in accordance with the principles of the Jewish religion, prepares the dead for burial, accompanies them on their last journey and places their bodies in graves. The article uses the conceptual apparatus from the area of anthropotanatology, suicidology, cultural anthropology, cultural sexology, nozology and sociology.