Kolczasta sensualność. Miasto szwedzkich melancholików przełomu XIX i XX wieku

In: Przegla̜d humanistyczny, Band 62, Heft 2 (461), S. 109-127

Abstract

The text shows the picture of nineteenth-century Stockholm saturated with negative
content, revealing a large city as a space of deadness, chimerical vitalism, and unconditional
dissolution as a result of crisis of values. Symptomatic for the nineteenth-century European
social changes made the literary city a reflection of this process by showing the urban
monstrosity of that destructive energy, its unfriendliness and controversy. This case is
similar. The novelistic city shows multidimensional loneliness of man of that time. This
image maps the entity which is not able to save its subjectivity, to find the formula, the
man who from the heights of his own selfishness precipitates his identity into the abyss of
all progression. It also shows the doom of rudimentary value, flattening of anthropocentric
dimension of existence in favour of the eruption of animalistic instincts, impulses and
consumerism. The characters in Hjalmar Söderberg's novel – Martin, Arvid, Gabriel or
Tomas – circulate in this space, wander, chase, roam the empty area looking for values. The
characters being in chronic pointless movement automatically include themselves in an
insensitive stream of street momentum, as they were passively involved in this whole
theatre of gestures. Stockholm is a symbol of the inertial city, neutral existentially, it is
a braid of illusions, fantasies, afterimages. The city is a zone of axiological deadness,
damages. A sad face of the city chronically becomes a grimace of everything that is wrong,
hardening into the "damage", closure. It is an unusual character of this prose.