Po stronie życia, przeciw melancholii

The subject of Wojciech Rusinek’s review is Marek Bieńczyk’s collection of essays Jabłko Olgi, stopy Dawida [Olga’s Apple, David’s Feet]. The author begins his reading of the book by placing it in the context of Bieńczyk’s earlier achievements: both artistic (novels, literary essays) and academic (bearing witness to his studies on Romanticism). While noting that Bieńczyk’s essays are governed by a wealth and a surprising variety of the explored themes, Rusinek emphasises, however, the worldview coherence of the volume. According to the author of the review, a key to the interpretation of all the essays in the book is “the praise of the taste of life,” which makes a new tone in Bieńczyk’s writing, so far associated mainly with the reflection on melancholy and melancholy discourse present in his artistic prose. In the following part of the review, by outlining the content of the essays devoted to Proust’s and Nerval’s prose, Hopper’s painting or Sempé’s drawings, Rusinek analyses the anthropological figures around which Bieńczyk’s digressive and slow reflection revolves: gesture, light, escape, frozen time. The reading of Bieńczyk’s work becomes enriched with an analysis of style (a role of stylization). Moreover, the review points out those fragments of Jabłko Olgi, stopy Dawida where a description of artistic works becomes smoothly linked with the elements of the author’s biography. In the conclusion of the reflection upon Bieńczyk’s essays, the author states that the essays clearly lean towards poetics of epiphany, which, in the view of the author of Jabłko Olgi…, would mean an unclear, veiled by an infinite number of borrowings, allegories, allusions and stylizations, suspending the flow of time, experience of existence in its inexpressible fullness.