Automatization and reborn of the characters in Jerzy Sosnowski’s The Aglaja Apocryph

The paper discusses the issues of split spirit and body, as well as dual reality (“interpretation through media / virtuality”) and mirroring in the book “The Aglaja Apocryph” by Jerzy Sosnowski. This means that the characters and “authors” of the two novels that make up the book, live as if in two worlds, “as in computer games.” The paper thus reveals how Sosnowski understands the modern syndrome of life and generally postmodern phenomenon of hyperreality and simulacra. The author of the paper explores how heroes turn simultaneously into people and machines, how their body turns out to be a machine that comes to life, and only “trust” can overcome the unreliability of such reality. The material for the analysis is also the problem of the instability of “reality and fiction” as well as “author and hero.” The fictitious author, the writer of the novel looks at the supposedly real creatures, living persons, on the one hand, as his heroes, and on the other, as an electric object, a thing (“coffee-maker”), bringing these two incompatible phenomena and concepts closer. In the course of the analysis of the text “The Aglaja Apocryph” reveals both the complex relationship between the author and the hero – the rebellion of creation against its creator, and the constant criticism of fiction and words. Poetry is rewritten from a scientific and technical position, which is also deconstructed in the name of the right to poetic language. In the same regard, the work is devoted to the analysis of the motivational and metaphorical presentation of the relationship between male and female characters. The study of plant, zoomorphic components, musical elements and artefacts related to the images in question leads to the discovery of parallelisms between different parts of the book, in which several readings of the same story of a woman and a man collide: who is a predator and who is a victim; who is a machine and who is a human; who is the creator and who is the creation? Discursive and stylistic multilayers, intertextual references (for example, Faust), etc. interact and create new interpretive lines in the book. The focus of the paper's author, however, appeals primarily to the problem of self-invention and self-reflection, which can not be realized without telling and detailing the own story. Summing up the analysis, the paper's author concludes the need for verbal presentation, the transgression of the story into metaphorical text in order to highlight the complex nature and new meaning of the issues put forward and discussed in Sosnowski's book.