Abstract:
At the turn of 19th century there existed in oral and popular literature a group of humorous songs on wandering beggars, who were named dziady. For a long time the performance of these songs was wrongly ascribed dziady themselves. In this chapter I aim at verifying that these and claim that these texts should be linked not to the authentic creativity of beggars but to a trend within anti-beggary satirical literature, because they reveal a definitely negative and parodical presentation of dziady as a cynical boozers and swindlers looking for easy money. In the second part of the chapter I present an analysis of literary works stylized as songs from the repertoire of wandering beggars. The analysis focuses on the most frequent lexical phrases and models of versification. I conclude that these techniques of stylization were always completed with adding in the opening part of the texts a sketch about performative situation: the initial verses revealed a beggar as a narrator, who asks the audience to listen attentively to some sensational news.
