Reflections and repetitions : a treatise on Narcissus of the Young Poland

In literature, and fi rst of all in the poetry of the Young Poland, the motifs of the refl ection in the water or the mirror, shadows, multiplications and repetitions have a key signifi cance. In the poetry of the two equally aged poets, but dissimilar from each other - Leopold Staff and Bolesław Leśmian, these images become an occasion to refl ect upon the truth and falsity, identity and non-identity, finally creation and art. In the "reflection" poems Leśmian and Staff deal with the problem of subjectivity signifi cant for the whole modernism, as it is done in the French poetry by Valery and Mallarmé, in English - Yeats, and German - George and later Rilke. The Narcissus of the Young Poland or not rarely she-Narcissus, similarly to the one from the famous André Gide’s Treatise of the Narcissus, busy contemplating his own reflection he freezes in timeless eternal "now" and - contrary to the myth - loses the awareness of the border between "I" and "non-I". However, the most important moment is, when, in the works from 1910-1914, the modernist Narcissus does not recognize himself in the reflection, or, when he cannot see his reflection. "Refl ections have disappeared..." - we read in the poem "The prisoner of mirrors" written by Staff, which is of great importance to scholars today. And in Prologue by Leśmian a mirror experiment leads to the creation of a manless reflection tunnel, which one can enter only after death. Tracing of the changes, to which the motif was subject in the years 1890-1918, allows understanding of many issues of anthropology and aesthetics of the 20th century.