Facta ficta — wokół apokryficznych Pamiętników Hadriana

Abstract

The main issue of this article is primarily the paratextual comments by Marguerite Yourcenar made about her novel Memoirs of Hadrian. Paradoxically — despite all the objections of the author against recognising the text in terms of apocrypha (defined as a strong hoax / forgery) — the remarks confirm the diagnosis of the apocryphal character of the novel in another sense. Those self-commentaries, which relate to efforts to uphold ancient realities and build the illusion behind the authenticity of the autobiography of the emperor, support the idea and such understanding of apocrypha, which fully utilizes the potential genre intertext, or biblical apocrypha. The apocryphal character of Memoirs of Hadrian and other literary quasi-autobiographical fictions are not false attributions in which the role of the author is to play real historical persons, determine mimetic convention of a narrative, renarration and re-focalization and related to them is the supplementation of biographical or (possibly) autobiographical intertextuality.