Gothicism, terror, freneticism. A comparative perspective: Poe — Krasiński
Edgar Allan Poe and Zygmunt Krasiński were writers who did not know each other, but in whose works we can find some analogies, as can be seen in the Gothic stories The Fall of the House of Usher and Grób rodziny Reichstalów [The Tomb of the Reichstal Family]. In these two similarly titled works the authors created a kind of space-times of terror set in a family house castle. The worlds presented, placed in a real world, make the readers aware especially in Poe’s work of the presence of unknown, unrecognisable, mysterious phenomena which involve the spheres of ultimate human transgression. Using the aesthetics of freneticism, the writers show gruesome situations surrounding the theme of death and dying. Thus, in a general sense, they present similar approaches to Gothic anthropology — defining humans as beings determined by inevitable destruction. What brings Poe and Krasiński closer together is their analogous aesthetics of imagination, generating their different paths as writers.