A Poetic Death — the Literary Images of Suicidal Deaths in the Literature of Nineteenth Century

There exists something like beautiful life. Is it possible to die beautifully? Is there a beauty that can
be related to something as terrifying as suicidal dying? The study presents attempts of making the death
poetic by the characters that emerged in opuses of the authors of the nineteenth century. The paper shows
the reasons why these characters tried to die in a sophisticated way, which cannot be trivial at all. The
author of this study attempts to explain why they make their death look like a performance. And the
number of viewers is not the most important issue they are worrying about. What is really meaningful
is to tear the constraints which are imposed by society, culture, people’s demands and to achieve the
liberation from life’s and death’s schemes. The main premise of the paper is that, for all characters, the
suicidal death is most of all the manifestation of their own need to decise about themselves and to explore
an art in every detail of people’s existence. The discussed phenomena are illustrated in the novels of
Henryk Sienkiewicz, Gabriela Zapolska and Włodzimierz Perzyński.