Studia Językoznawcze

The article contains an analysis of the letters written by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and addressed to his late lover Jerzy Błeszyński, and depicts the manner of ‘talking’ of the author of the letters about the addressee’s death so that it can be neutralised, i.e. its impact on the life of the writer will be weakened and/or the opposition between death (afact that took place) and life (in the ima gined world of the letters) will be abolished. The article may be placed in the sphere of re-search based on the method of stylistic grammar, and it deals with the questions that concern semantic phenomena and the manner of their formal-language creation. Iwaszkiewicz used the motif of the trip that never happened of Błeszyński to Surubai, Indonesia, to replace with it mentions of his lover’s death in the whole collection of the ‘posthumous letters’ In addition to coding it – the death – with words and expressions taken from the lexical field of travelling in the analysed text there are linguistic exponents of conceptualisation of death as an absence and separation of the dead person. In two letters Iwaszkiewicz refers to the death of Błeszyński as adream. In order to avoid talking directly about death the author of the ‘posthum-ous letters’ uses afew euphemisms. However, in Iwaszkiewicz’s letters there appear various linguistic tracks of adeath of aperson he was close to. He is aware of the fact that Błeszyński left for good, and at the same time he cannot believe it.