Romana Jaworskiego „wjeżdżanie w miasto”. Urbanizm opowiadań

he article discusses the semantics of the motif of the city in Roman Jaworski’s short stories collected in the volume “Historie maniaków” (“The Stories of Maniacs”). Creation of the motif allows to identify the hero of the prose (an individualist, a kind of maniac) and the antihero (the crowd) who are in a constant struggle. The city is portrayed with expressions describing non-aesthetic visual and acoustic effects, and thus becomes a figure of modern civilization which threatens the individualist. The individualist, to continue, dreaming and taking advantage of various fighting strategies, raises a rebellion. His projects concerning the expansive nature of the urban agglomeration are doomed to failure. It is only fanciful creation that decides about a kind of victory of an individual, helpless against the pressure of mass culture. Jaworski presents the process which Georg Simmel calls “tragedy of culture,” and he is interested in one of its phases, namely a prolonged moment of antagonistic civilization product turning against the producer. In such antagonistic persistence Jaworski sees the nature of modernity to which the maniac, opposing it, is doomed.