Arkadia Heleny Radziwilłowej - zagadnienie śmierci w XVIII-wiecznym ogrodzie

The author of the article tried to subject Arcadia near Nieborów, the garden of Helena
\nRadziwiłł (1753-1821) to the formal and textual analysis, paying special attention to the
\nsubject of death present there.
\nI he garden with its architectural buildings was created in the last quarter of 18th century,
\ninspired by the ideas of English gardens, it was also strongly influenced firstly by the
\nsentimental and secondly by the romantic aesthetics. As early as the first designs were
\nPrepared, the mason ideas were taken into consideration as well.
\nDiffused elements of death symbols existed since the beginning in the whole garden (like
\ne. g. the name of a river - Leta, a mithological river of Forgetting, flowing through Hades).
\nOn the Poplar Island there was a tomb errected, modeled after the tomb of J. J. Rousseau,
\nWlth two inscriptions: Et in Arcadia ego and J’ai fa it Arcadie j'y repose. The intention of the
\nPrincess was also do construct in the garden her own real tomb. All these elements of the
\nKarden’s scenery, inspired by the literary sources (arcadian literature and writings of Rousseau
\nthe key to understanding the park of Radziwiłł with its widely conceived naturality, idillical
\nstate of happiness and the death theme), formed a part of ideological program of Arcadia
\nand constituted a part of a certain intellectual game. But, since all three daughters of the
\nPrincess died one after another (in 1796, 1806 and 1808), death appeared in the garden as
\na tragic fact. Helena Radziwiłł decided to bury their bodies in the tomb, which she previously
\nProvided for herself. The first such mausoleum in Poland was decorated with carefully elaborated consolation program that had practically nothing in common with Christian
\ncschatology.
\nDeath symbols and the burial in the garden are not any novelty introduced by the
\nprincess: the death was gradually penetrating European and especially English gardens over
\n18th century. Nevertheless, on the Polish ground it was quite a new and untypical phenomenon.
\nMoreover, the name of the park - Arcadia - refers in a particular way the garden to the
\nsphere of myth.
\nThe decision of burying her daughters in an unholy ground, especially taken in deeply
\ntraditional Poland, must have been based on some very strong justification. Among many
\nkinds of sacrum present within the garden symbols, there was surely no place for the Christian
\nsacrum. The spacc of the garden was rather sanctified by the resurrected mythology, mason
\nesolericism, by the history and time frozen in the collected objects and also by the nature
\nitself. It existed in the park of Helena Radziwiłł in an intensified form, representing, to some
\nextent, the purity and the beauty of the whole nature within only a little fragment of spacc.
\nLooking for the roots of so deep a transformation of the elite’s mentality of the Enlightenment,
\nwe arrive at the Cartesian dualism and its influence on the philosophy and the intellectual
\natmosphere of the 18th century. In the mechanistic world there was no place left for God
\nRevealed nor his religion. The first goddess of 18th century - the Nature - had sufficient
\ninfluence on minds and feelings of her worshippers to convince them that she was the first
\nand unquestionable condition of living and sanctifying death. The program and actual
\nbreaking with Christian eschatology gave rise to the necessity of some new canon of
\ncomprehending death. In this way, the elegiac memories of the buried man - “the contemplative
\npenetrating the idea of mortality” - took the place of the consolation, previously brought by
\nthe thoughts of Heaven, Salvation and Resurrection.
\nArcadia near Nieborów found itself at the end of a long way, which the topos of “a
\ngarden as paradise” had to go through, since the times of the Garden of Eden. On the one
\nhand it was still an attempt to create a space for human happiness beyond time where the
\neternal youth and spring prevailed. On the other hand, along other European gardens of its
\ntime, Arcadia constructed a form of a bridge, opening the way to the 19th century gardens
\nof death.

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