Krajobraz i melancholia

Abstract

The analyses in this paper are concerned with the various relationships between landscape and melancholy. Crucial, from the perspective taken up in the text, is the shift from allegorical representations of melancholy, which operate with the category of landscape in an instrumental way, to the feeling of melancholy. This change has made melancholy more closely associated with the experience of landscape. The author also points to a close connection with the experience of nostalgia, which is associated with melancholy and is directly related not so much to transience as to the sense of loss and the impossibility of recovering what has been lost. The author also analyses the category of void, pointing to its perverse logic of what imprisons and what liberates, of spatiality and confinement, pointing to the creative potential of melancholy.