Journal Article

The Scream of an Artist´s Naked Soul. The Novel Krik/ The Scream in the Context of Przybyszewski´s ideological and aesthetical Conception

Tomáš Horváth

2017

Overview

The paper is an interpretation of the novel Krik (Krzyk/The Scream, 1917) by Polish modernist writer Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868 – 1927) within the context of Przybyszewski´s ideological and aesthetical conception including notions such as the naked soul, sexual instinct (chuć), metaword and androgyny. The hallucinatory and dreamy fictitious world of the novel, built up using the literary method of discontinuity of chronotopes, is related to Przybyszewski´s view of reality as the reality of the naked soul. The literary production is a scream of a naked soul which is linked to the forces of the unconscious mind including subconscious impulses and instincts. They control the conscious self, who thus becomes unautonomous, and they split it up (the motif of a double in the novel). The narrative structure of the novel is based on the principle of repetition with a difference: the main hero, artist Gaštovt, wants the impossible: he wants to hear again the scream of the prostitute jumping off the bridge. The repetition is, however, – in Nietzsche´s words – the return of the different: Gaštovt first saves the female suicide, but then longing for the repetition of the scream he kills her. The structure of the repetition joins several motifs in the text: the individual characters reappear as different ones in the feverish maze of Gaštovt´s wandering: the jarvey later as the violinist, the female suicide later as the hypnotized actress, the stranger later as Weryho, and eventually Weryho as Gaštovt himself (in the final motif of a double).

• Publisher: Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slovak Literature
• Subject: expressionism / modernism / sexual instinct (chuć) / the naked soul