The Stefan Żeromski tropes (or traces) of passion

Stemming from philosophical standpoints, which locate ‘passion’ in the realm of thought (Marcus Eremita, René Descartes, Hannah Arendt), this article endeavours to prove that passionate thinking was the basis of Stefan Żeromski’s creation of his own textual space of intimacy, namely journals. Because he made the phenomenon of passion the subject of this thinking (he learned the characteristics of this passion mostly from his own intimate experiences with women, and he verbalised it), the article exposes the understanding of this phenomenon by the writer, through an analysis of stylistic tropes in his journal entries. It becomes apparent that a verbal visualisation of passion brought with it an evolution of tropes he particularly favoured in creating an image of passion: similes and metaphors. These have been semantically deepened by the construction of certain enclaves of stylistic devices, which not only brought together their differing types, but most importantly accumulated them. The end result of this mechanism are suggestive images, through which Żeromski managed to verbally illustrate passion.