Landscape and Imagination: A History of Fascination and an Anatomy of Passion in Jacek Woźniakowski’s Góry niewzruszone [Immovable Mountains] and Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind

Abstract

Mountain studies in the humanities concentrates on the relation between people and mountains. Robert Macfarlane explored that topic in Mountains of the Mind (2003). In this article, Macfarlane’s bestseller is compared with Jacek Woźniakowski’s Góry Niewzruszone [Immovable Mountains] (1974). The Polish art historian writes about the history and the place of mountains in culture and art since Antiquity to Romanticism. Macfarlane’s book picks up, as if, where Woźniakowski left off. Both works are complementary in this regard, and allow one to reconstruct a history of a fascination, which starts with aversion and often leads to a deadly and dangerous obsession. Both authors dissect a passion for mountains: Woźniakowski comes up with a typology of cultural approaches to mountains, and Macfarlane lists and explains the reasons for the fascination with height. These two approaches are also complementary.