The aim of the article is to analyze the metaphor of the black sun in the
correspondence and in the work of Zygmunt Krasiński, one of the greatest Polish
Romantics. The black sun appears very early in this work, because Krasiński had
already written about it in his juveniles edited in French. In these early works (for
example, A Dream and Fragment of a Dream both from 1830), the writer portrays dark
visions related to a cosmic catastrophe and the Last Judgment. The persona of these
texts, plunged in despair, is an isolated individual both in the social and metaphysical
sense. The metaphor of the black sun, however, develops in two dramas by Krasiński:
Non-divine comedy (1835) and Irydion (1836). The meaning of this metaphor
changes, and Krasiński sees in it not only existential (pessimistic) content but also
historiosophical meanings. The fading sun or the sunset in these dramas is a metaphor
for the fall of history, the end of times; it is also clearly religious because the night,
devoid of hope for the return of the sun, becomes the eternal night that follows Christ’s
crucifixion and is identical with the dominance of Satan in the human world order