Category of space in the system of intertextual connections Miciński’s essay Portrait of Kant
Abstract
The article explores the intermedial connections between B. Miсiński’s essay Portrait of Kant and painting as a “spatial” art form. The essayist engages in a polemic with Lessing, the author of Laocoön, by examining painting and poetry in their identity. The role of portrait and object details in the structure of the text is defined. The essay highlights the special illustrative and expressive function of litotes, which serves the idea of the spatial ordering of the world, a concept that, according to Miсiński, governed both the life and philosophy of Kant. The principle of continuity plays a key role in the artistic space of the essay, bringing together distant philosophical and artistic texts. The intertextual continuum is created through dialogic connections between different eras and national-cultural traditions, including ancient Greek, English, French, Russian, and Polish. A special place in the semantic structure of the essay is occupied by the epigraph — a poem by one of the most renowned Polish poets of the 20th century, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, dedicated to the great Königsberg native. This poetic paraphrase of Kant’s famous maxim from the conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason associates the contemplation of the starry sky and the awareness of the moral law with the pessimistic and catastrophic tone of fear and dread. Iwaszkiewicz’s modification of Kant’s worldview is indirectly connected to the reception of the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. The principle of simultaneity, which underpins the modeling of space in Miсiński’s essay, resonates with the main ideas in Ya. E. Golosovker’s essay Dostoevsky and Kant, which draws a connection between Kant’s antinomies and the controversial mindset of the Karamazov brothers — Ivan and Dmitry.