“NIEKEDY SA VRACAJÚ.“ TRANSFORMÁCIA BALADICKEJ LENÓRSKEJ TÉMY V MODERNIZME

The study analyses the reinterpretation of Bürger´s ballad Lenore (1774) in terms of inter-textuality, genre and literary movement in the modernist short story by the Polish writer Antoni Lange Lenora (1912). According to Lange, his short story „tries to explain the ´balladic´, spiritualist phenomena by rational means“. Lange´s modernist reinterpretation modifies the motif of the return of the dead: in Bürger´s poem it is a physical return of the dead – a spectre having physical features, in Lange´s short story it is Konrad´s revelation interpreted as a meta-psychic phenomenon when a telepathic transmission occurs at the moment of Konrad´s death. The syuzhet of the story does not contain a contact with the afterlife and a crossing of the borderline between the opposite semantic territories, being life and death. Therefore Konrad does not act as a diabolical revenant as opposed to all the other balladic variations of the theme.