Apokaliptyczny wymiar zbiorowego dążenia do szczęścia. "Laimės žiburys" Jonasa Biliūnasa

LTReikšminiai žodžiai: Jaunoji Lenkija; Jaunoji Lenkija (Mloda Polska); Jonas Biliūnas; Laimė; Laimės žiburys; Marksizmas; Modernizmas; Parabolė; Pasaka; Progresas; Religija; Žmonijos religija; Fairy tale; Happiness; Jonas Biliūnas; Laimės žiburys (The Light of Hapiness); Marxism; Marxism, progress; Modernism; Parable; Progress; Religion; Religion of Humanity; Young Poland.

ENThe relationship between a Lithuanian writer Jonas Biliūnas and the members of the Young Poland modernist movement seems to be rather difficult to reconstruct. Some obituaries, published in Polish newspapers after his death in Zakopane in 1908, stressed both the poetical mood and the deep sadness of his works and thus connected him with the fin-de-siècle epoch. On the other hand, being a socialist, lie judged contemporary Polish literature as aristocratic, sophisticated and hazy. Nevertheless, the affirmation of art, the inclination to free it froiu external duties, and the metaphysical interest brought his later stories closer to the style of early modernism. The use of the word pasaka (a fairy talc) in the subtitle of "The Light of Happiness" (1905) is symptomatic of this tendency, as it associates this short story with the mythical realm of eternal laws of Humanity, conceived in a very abstract way. Biliūnas's collective hero pursuits happiness with determination, disregarding the number of casualties piling up into a huge mountain. Although the writer represents a strictly secular, revolutionary point of view, he develops a biblical stylisation to tell his "fairy tale". Having reached the state of everlasting fortune, the Humanity, like in August Comte's "Religion of Humanity", commemorates the fruitful hecatomb in a rather formal celebration once a year, enjoying the whole life in the shadow cast by the huge mountain of suffering in the centre of the world. No wonder that in the Soviet Union "The Light of Happiness" was on the required reading list in schools since it justified the inhuman power. The ethical consequences of Biliūnas's short stoiy, overlooked by the author, make the sense of it even more apocalyptic. [From the publication]