Artur Daniel Liskowacki

Marriage

Excerpt

"Marriage" consists of two related stories. The first one is the fictionalised biography of Antoni Malczewski (1793-1826), a romantic poet who published one work in his lifetime, a novel in verse called “Maria” (1825), and who was the first Pole to climb Mont Blanc (1818). Liskowacki focuses on the last five years of Malczewski’s life, a stormy period marked by a public scandal (the poet’s relationship with a married, mentally ill woman, which shocked contemporary society). The second story is about the holiday adventure of a boy called Muszka. It is set in the present at a summer resort. At the narrative level it is about an encounter between an emotionally neglected child and a Stranger, who is somewhere between a fugitive and a bandit, for whom the boy provides food and clothing. Although each story could stand on its own, Liskowacki has decided to put them together. What is his justification? Certainly the card metaphor of the title (there was once a card game called “marriage”, and it is also the name for a pair of cards, a king and queen in the same suit). So we have a card-game image: Malczewski’s life story is told from the end (the first chord struck is the writer’s death in May 1826), while the story of Muszka and the Stranger is told the traditional way, as a sequence of cause and effect. Both stories feature not just the motif of card-playing, but also game-playing in various senses. Malczewski is playing a game of acceptance and recognition with his milieu, a game of overcoming social infamy, and a two-way psychological game links the boy and the dangerous man.

Dariusz Nowacki

Artur Daniel Liskowacki (born 1956) is a novelist, poet, essayist, theatre critic and journalist. He has written several books of sketches on the German and Polish history of Szczecin.