JAN BARSZCZEWSKI’S MYTHOLOGICAL URBANISM

The article defines the authorial myth about the city as an artistic truth which is created by the author according to his own laws, and a new reality which is modeled according to the laws of mythological consciousness and urban mythology (represented by folk legends about wonderful moments in the history of the city, its life, its inhabitants and its space, where the city is perceived as a holistic, living cultural body). According to Jan Barszczewski’s artistic interpretation, the city is an ambivalent image; its symbolic ambiguity is disclosed by the author through the use of the biblical concepts of the city of Paradise, the city of Hell and the city of Purgatory. It is revealed that archetypal moments of the biblical history as well as Belarusians’ pagan ideas are transformed in the authorial myth; their use contributes to the understanding of the imperfections of the current situation in the world and to the perception of hope for a renewal which is conceived by the writer not as creating something new, but as returning to the original harmony. On the one hand, the renewal in Jan Barszczewski’s urban myth is connected with the idea of a utopian return of the Golden Age and is intertwined with the belief in the man of nature and in a subsistence economy; on the other hand, the renewal is manifested in the author’s inconsistent hopes for the city as a center of education, high culture and spirituality. It is emphasized that the key motif in Jan Barszczewski’s urban mythology is the loss of the historical memory, which is a sign of degradation and naturally precedes the end of the history of the city; it is part of eschatological myths, but the eschatological in the urban myths is made less tragic through the motifs of cyclic recurrence and renewal. The article defines eschatology in urban mythology and utopia in the authorial myth of the city as an expression of the idea of cyclic recurrence. The distinctive features of the writer’s worldview are identified.

Belarusian literature of the 19th century, myth, mythology, mythmaking, Belarusian national myth, urban mythology, eschatology, utopia, renewal, idealization

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