Things and compassion : Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy for the departure of pen ink and lamp" within the twentieth-century elegy on the example of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Duinesian elegies"

Streszcz. po ang.

This paper concerns the relation between twentieth-century model of an elegy (analyzed on the example of Rainer Maria Rilke's works) and Zbigniew Herbert's "Elegy for the departure of pen ink and lamp". Similarities and differences between them show the direction of the genre’s evolution - a process of rejecting formal characteristics for a specific position of the subjectivity, searching for an existential complementarity. In effect the "elegiac" seems to be not a consequence of formal organization, but of the dialectics. Thus, the category could be applied in a wider sense than heretofore.