Szczęśliwe zakończenie poszukiwań. „Kinder-Gartenlaube” jako źródło ilustracji do baśni „O krasnoludkach i o sierotce Marysi”

Abstract

The paper aims to present a discovery that entails settlement of the source of illustration employed by Michał Arct in the first edition of Maria Konopnicka’s “O krasnoludkach i o sierotce Marysi“ (Little Orphan Mary and the Gnomes) (Warsaw 1896) that was a German periodical for children “Kinder-Gartenlaube.” In its 11 issues published between 1887 and 1890 the researchers have found every single image that several years later was used in the Warsaw edition. A detailed examination of the illustrations and the texts that accompanied them in their original context allow to state that Konopnicka knew both, and due to diversity of ways to refer to them she proved to have been a master interpreter, a translator and an author of poetic ekphrasis for whom the material delivered by the publisher did not become a limitation, but rather a catalyser of imagination.