Disappearing Suns, Disappearing Worlds — The Black Sun in Krasiński’s Work

Abstract

The aim of the article is to analyze the metaphor of the black sun in the correspondence and in the work of Zygmunt Krasiński, one of the greatest Polish Romantics. The black sun appears very early in this work, because Krasiński had already written about it in his juveniles edited in French. In these early works (for example, A Dream and Fragment of a Dream both from 1830), the writer portrays dark visions related to a cosmic catastrophe and the Last Judgment. The persona of these texts, plunged in despair, is an isolated individual both in the social and metaphysical sense. The metaphor of the black sun, however, develops in two dramas by Krasiński: Non-divine comedy (1835) and Irydion (1836). The meaning of this metaphor changes, and Krasiński sees in it not only existential (pessimistic) content but also historiosophical meanings. The fading sun or the sunset in these dramas is a metaphor for the fall of history, the end of times; it is also clearly religious because the night, devoid of hope for the return of the sun, becomes the eternal night that follows Christ’s crucifixion and is identical with the dominance of Satan in the human world order.

Keywords

• metaphor of the black sun
• zygmunt krasiński
• romanticism
• philosophy of history.