Baryka’s Genealogies

This article deals with the issue of family in Stefan Żeromski’s last novel. In the first paragraph of Przedwiośnie [ The Spring to come], the narrator declares that the problem of a modern man’s family is limited to relations with his mother and father, but contrary to this declaration, the main protagonist is ascribed two pedigrees that correspond to the cultural heritage of the author’s own generation: noble family roots and faith in progress thanks to the technological revolution. The first traces Cezary back to his great-grandfather Kalikst, who was the last lord of Sołowijówka, but lost his estate as a result of the post-Uprising repressions. The second is revealed to him on the repatriation train by his father, who tells him about his cousin, engineer Baryka, who is building a new civilisation in Poland. In both cases, the family legacy has no real status: Sołowijówka is long lost, the precious diary is stolen, the glass houses are nowhere to be seen. At the same time, both family histories are bracketed by doubt through a presentation subordinated to a convention that strips them of their status of credibility: in the first case, this is determined by a storytelling pastiche, in the second by a dialogic game. It seems, then, that in his last novel Żeromski broke the line of inheritance of attitudes and ideas, of which he himself was the heir, and pointed out the total difference in the situation of the young after the First World War and the restoration of independence. Indeed – the young are left with a father and mother: both dying in longing for their homeland and marking their son with this legacy.