Poetycki agon w głębi mózgu O wierszu Nadchodzi noc Stanisława Korab Brzozowskiego

This article contains a reading of the poem ‘Nadchodzi noc’ [The night is coming] by Stanisław Korab-Brzozowski in the context of his evolving poetic biography, primarily with regard to the gradual spiritualization of his idea of the ‘naked soul’. While the brain occupies the central position in in Korab-Brzozowski’s poetic landscape, it is not merely a material locus of consciousness. The crucial element of the chain of events in ‘Nad-chodzi noc’ is located inside the brain, the dark area where, paradoxically, the physio-logical trigger goes into spiritual overdrive (the dying sunrays “go up in a fire and glow, / Which puts the night to flight / Forever.) The unexpected ending of a matter-of-fact description can be an indication of Korab-Brzozowski’s joining Stanisław Przybyszewski in his 1890s Berlin battles with plain naturalism (die bloße Schilderung). Yet at the same the young contributor of the magazine Życie [Life] entered into subtle polemic with his literary master. Later, as secretary of the flagship modernist magazine Chimera, Korab- -Brzozowski kept up a shifting balance, i.e. a poetic agon, between Przybyszewski’s antinaturalism and the latest developments in empiricist physiology (Angelo Mosso and Cesare Lombroso among others).