Old age, commonly viewed as “inability, regress, fadedness”, appears as a leitmotiv in sylva’s33 triptych and Tadeusz Konwicki’s auto comments

Whole Tadeusz Konwicki’s works have been strongly influenced by his own personal experiences.
In his work Kalendarz i klepsydra one can find the same motives, situations, figures and descriptions of
nature. However, one of the most repetitive leitmotive’s in his prose is ageing. In a very surprising way
because of the fact that at the same time it is unpredictable and ironic, the author presents this topic in his
autobiographical prose — that is in sylva’s triptych consisted of Kalendarz i klepsydra, Wschody i zachody
księżyca and Nowy Świat i okolice. It is quite an extraordinary situation taking into consideration the fact
that during the publication of the first sylva Konwicki is fifty years old — is it the age when human starts
thinking about death. That question will probably be left with no answer.
It is highly likely that such way of thinking about death and ageing appeared in his works because
of the intensity of the experience he had gained before throughout his half of a century life. Maybe it is
some kind of trick to achieve the advantage over the dialogue between an intelligent reader and himself
as an author.
Ageing in Konwicki’s works is multidimensional — it does not refer only to the physical ageing but
also to the process of literary creation. Therefore the main purpose of this article is to collect, describe and
categorise the most important topics and motives when Konwicki pretended to be old man.