Szymborska's Lens: Re-reading Andersen's Fairy Tales as a Moral Diagnosis

3 hours ago7 min read

The late Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska turned a critical eye to the work of Hans Christian Andersen, revealing a depth often lost in adaptation. She argued that Andersen’s true courage lay in his willingness to write stories with authentically unhappy endings, defying the convention that children's tales must trade in comforting moral arithmetic.Szymborska saw in Andersen a rejection of the transactional notion that goodness is a down payment on future reward. Instead, his narratives propose that one should be good because evil itself is not a grand, romantic antagonist, but the manifestation of a stunted mind and an impoverished heart—a form of wretchedness from which society naturally shrinks.This reframing elevates the fairy tale from mere parable to a tool for psychological inquiry, shifting the focus on cruelty from external power to internal deficiency. Szymborska’s incisive, understated analysis feels strikingly contemporary, challenging a public discourse that often reduces complex moral failings to simple narratives. She invites readers back to these classics not for solace, but for a clearer, more disquieting assessment of humanity, proving that the oldest stories can harbor the most pressing and uncomfortable truths about our nature and what we deem monstrous.

#Wisława Szymborska

#fairy tales

#fear

#literature

#philosophy

#Nobel Prize

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