The essential problem discussed in this paper is the use of rhetorical figures, symbol, and allegory in Young Poland Literature. In the discourse of literary criticism of this period authors expressed their intentions to replace allegory, which was associated with traditional, widely-held ways of creating meanings, with symbol, which was considered modern and polysemous. Surprisingly, the artistic practice did not follow these theoretical declarations as writers still frequently used allegorical constructions. In the article, the author tries to analyse the reasons of this state of affairs using theories of Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man and Gayatri Spivak. As an example of difficulties in the replacement of allegory by symbol in the period of Young Poland, the author proposes an interpretation of Stanisław Wyspiański’s drama Liberation. In this work, the poet criticizes the dependency of Polish culture at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the ideas of Romanticism (this quality is also condemned by Stanisław Brzozowski, commentator and interpreter of Wyspianski’s works). Contemporary readers, despite the greatest acknowledgement for the author of The Wedding, did not accept the poet’s ideas. The reasons for this was readers’ hunt for symbolic meanings where the author used plain allegories.
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