Amoralna moralistyka "Gwiezdnego księcia" Andrzeja Łuczeńczyka

Abstract The Amoral Moralism of “Gwiezdny książę” by Andrzej Łuczeńczyk Andrzej Łuczeńczyk was one of the most interesting representatives of the „artistic revolution in prose” promoted by the literary critic Henryk Bereza. In 2018, the PIW publishing house published his “Collected Works”, which were warmly received by critics. This creates an opportunity to take a deeper look at his work and initiate a discussion on it. In his avant-garde writing, Łuczeńczyk developed a distinct, although difficult to characterize unambiguously poetics based on a dry, unadorned, factual style, ellipsis, reduction, understatement and genre hybridity. The author’s thematic obsession was the fundamental issues of death and the sources of evil. In this article, I examine the issues of morality and eschatology, emphasizing the interpretation of the micro-novel “Gwiezdny książę” (“The Star Prince”), considered also in relation to other works by Łuczeńczyk, such as, among others, “Źródło” (“The Source”) and “Ciemna woda” (“The Dark Water”). This triptych can be read as a micro-novelistic cycle devoted to the protagonist’s evolution towards absolute evil. I approach the research problem primarily through stylistic and genological analysis, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope and Bartosz Brożek’s definition of abstraction. In the article, I also consider several suggestions put forward by the critical reception of Łuczeńczyk’s works, developing and supplementing its often accurate diagnoses, while at times offering counterarguments to controversial theses.The writer’s objective style, devoid of any ornaments and semantic redundancy – almost scientific in its precision – clashes with the (allegedly) adopted genre conventions of the historical, Walterscottian, Gothic or romantic anti-ballad novel. This results in an amoral morality tale about the sources of evil in man, devoid of even a shadow of the author’s moralizing commentary. According to Łuczeńczyk, these sources should be sought in the entropy and inertia of the modern world, which is deprived of a stable axiological core. This axiologically hollowed-out world leaves a gap for the formation of self-deified figures —specific counter-Gods — for whom the ultimate goal is the destruction of everything, and ultimately self-destruction.