Przybyszewska, Stanislawa (1901–1935)

Polish playwright who gained posthumous fame for her masterpiece, The Danton Case. Pronunciation: Pshi-bi-shef-ska. Born Stanislawa Pajak in 1901; died in the Free City of Gdansk (formerly Danzig) on August 15, 1935; illegitimate daughter of Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868–1927, a Polish writer) and Aniela Pajakowna (d. 1912, a professional artist); married Jan Panienski (a painter and teacher), in 1923 (died 1925); no children.

Produced a powerful dramatic trilogy on the French Revolution, several novels, and other works of lesser significance; work was rediscovered (1960s–1970s) and is now firmly established in the repertory of the Polish theater.

Stanislawa Przybyszewska began life in 1901 under less than auspicious circumstances as Stanislawa Pajak, the illegitimate daughter of Aniela Pajakowna and the modernist playwright Stanislaw Przybyszewski. Talented but artistically profligate, Przybyszewski led a dissolute lifestyle, fathering Stanislawa as the result of a passing affair with her mother, an aspiring painter and protégé of a wealthy Polish family. At the time, he was married to Dagny Juel Przybyszewska . (Dagny would be killed the same year in which Stanislawa was born.) Most of Stanislawa's childhood was spent outside of Poland to escape the censorious whispers that followed her mother almost everywhere she went. Attending schools in Paris, Vienna, and Zurich, Stanislawa never stayed long enough in any one place to make deep attachments or significant friendships. After her mother died suddenly in 1912, she lived with her maternal aunt, Helena Barlinska , who was to remain a source of support for the rest of her short life.

Living in Cracow where she was enrolled at the local teachers' college, Stanislawa met her father for the first time in 1919. Soon after, due to her uncle's intervention, she was able to legally adopt her father's name. Unfortunately, the young woman soon developed an unhealthy infatuation for the famous and glamorous stranger who had so dramatically entered her life. Stanislaw Przybyszewski, called by some "satanic," practiced the black arts and dabbled in devil worship, and it was at this time that he introduced his daughter to morphine, to which she became addicted, and allegedly raped her.

In 1920, at her father's insistence, Przybyszewska moved to Poznan, where he was then living. Her busy schedule included music courses and one semester at the local university studying philosophy, while she supported herself working as a clerk in the post office. The strain brought on a nervous breakdown. At this time, she was also drawn to Poznan's literary and artistic avant-garde, which centered around the Expressionist journal Zdrój (The Source). She also met and fell in love with the man she would marry, a young painter and chemist named Jan Panienski.

In 1922, the restless Stanislawa moved to Warsaw, where she worked in a left-wing bookstore. Soon she was moving in Communist circles, which were under constant surveillance by a reactionary and anti-Marxist regime. Arrested for her "anti-Polish" political views, Stanislawa was imprisoned for some months but eventually released. For a short time, she taught at one of Warsaw's private schools.

In 1923, Przybyszewska married Panienski, moving with him to the ethnically German Free City of Gdansk (formerly Danzig) that had been created as a result of the Treaty of Versailles. For the next two years, which would be the happiest in Przybyszewska's life, she was active in local Polish artistic circles, gave lectures on psychoanalysis, spent considerable time painting, and carried out research into certain phases of the French Revolution, a subject that had deeply interested her ever since she had lived in France as a child. This happy period came to an end suddenly in 1925, when she received word that her husband had died while on a trip to Paris. He, too, was addicted to morphine and most likely died of an overdose.

From this point on until her death a decade later, Przybyszewska spent her days and nights in almost total isolation. Living without plumbing or electricity, in a tiny room in primitive wooden housing that was provided to her rent-free by the Polish Gymnasium to which it was attached, she studied, thought, and wrote almost exclusively about the French Revolution. In a trilogy of dramas—Thermidor, 1793, and The Danton Case—she dissected the phenomenon of revolution from both a historical and a psychological perspective. Thermidor was written in German and would not appear in a Polish translation until long after its author's death, receiving its first staging in 1971.

Emotionally fragile and suspended between languages and cultures, Przybyszewska largely ignored Gdansk, a place that was culturally German but was forced to exist in political limbo, and only chose to visit Poland briefly in 1927 (to attend her father's funeral), and again in 1928 and 1930 to visit friends in Poznan. Even her extreme poverty mattered little to her, since it was only one of many burdens which included loneliness, illnesses such as painful rheumatism, and an obsession about the creative process and a fear of losing control of it. Despite all this, she believed it inevitable that her work one day would be recognized and celebrated by the world. Her belief in her own abilities reflected overconfidence to the point of arrogance, and there can be little doubt that Przybyszewska's genius came close to dementia, as when she began in 1928 to date her letters according to the French revolutionary calendar that had been adopted in 1793 and talked of Danton and Robespierre as if they were her contemporaries.

During her lifetime, there would be only two productions of her play Sprawa Dantona (The Danton Case), one in Lwow (today Lviv, Ukraine) in 1931 (it was five hours long and ran for only five days), and the other in 1933 at Warsaw's Teatr Polski (the text was cut from 15 to 12 scenes and ran for 24 performances). Nothing came of a planned production of this play by the noted director Leon Schiller; such a venture was ruled out because of Schiller's reputation as a leftist following his production of the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera). As a result of Przybyszewska's leftist politics, her uncompromising artistic integrity, and just plain bad luck, her works were practically unknown during her lifetime.

Impoverished during the last decade of her life, Przybyszewska worked at her writing eight to ten hours, mostly at night. At first, she went to a

nearby grocery store to buy essentials (she subsisted largely on bread, butter, and tea). Addicted to the morphine without which she could neither concentrate nor write, she was also addicted to newspapers which she claimed to detest. In the final years of her tragic existence, Przybyszewska would walk slowly down the street, head bowed, and with an unsteady gait. Unable to find a way out of her misery, she nevertheless refused to abandon life. In a letter to Barlinska dated May 13, 1931, Stanislawa wrote: "And I don't want to die, no, I really don't want to die." A stray cat she had taken in from the streets was the only living thing to keep her company. In her last years, she avoided going out of her primitive shelter altogether, depending on the kindly wife of the Gymnasium's principal to provide food. Stanislawa Przybyszewska died on August 15, 1935, of malnutrition and tuberculosis, aggravated by many years of morphine addiction. Neighbors realized she had died when her cat's unusual behavior notified them that something was amiss. She was 34.

Stanislawa Przybyszewska is one of the great original talents of modern Polish, indeed, modern European, literature. Her works on the French Revolution were written in a highly original style combining dramatic chronicle with intellectual discussion. Her writing is also linked to such powerful works of late German Romanticism as the dramas of Georg Büchner and some of the plays of Romain Rolland. Contemporary interest in her plays is due to the efforts of Jerzy Krasowski, who discovered the manuscripts and staged The Danton Case at Wroclaw's Teatr Polski in 1971. With the publications of her plays in Gdansk in 1975, edited by Boleslaw Taborski, her trilogy on the French Revolution is now firmly established in the repertory of the Polish theater. Andrzej Wajda presented the play in Warsaw in 1975 and in Gdansk in 1980, which led to his 1982 film version Danton, starring Gerard Depardieu. The less than literal but cinematically brilliant adaptation presents the universal conflict between "the good genius" Robespierre, fighting for the moral rebirth of humanity, and "the evil genius" Danton, concerned solely with power and sensual pleasures. In 1986, Pam Gems ' adaptation from Boleslaw Taborski's translation reduced the play to a more manageable length for its first English-language presentation, at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

sources:

Beauvois, Daniel. "Chronique: L'Affaire Danton de Stanislawa Przybyszewska," in Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française. No. 240. April–June 1980, pp. 294–305.

Czerwinski, E.J., ed. Dictionary of Polish Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Gasiorowski, Professor Zygmunt J. Personal communication.

Ingdahl, Kazimiera. "Catastrophism as a Permanent State: Comments on Stanislawa Przybyszewska's Aesthetics," in Scando-Slavica. Vol. 36, 1990, pp. 21–39.

——. A Gnostic Tragedy: A Study in Stanislawa Przybyszewska's Aesthetics and Works. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1997.

Kosicka, Jadwiga, and Daniel Gerould. "A Life of Solitude: Stanislawa Przybyszewska," in The Polish Review. Vol. 29, no. 1–2, 1984, pp. 47–69.

——. A Life of Solitude—Stanislawa Przybyszewska: A Biographical Study with Selected Letters. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989.

Krol, Marcin. "Przybyszewska o Rewolucji Francuskiej," in Dialog. Vol. 18, no. 1, 1973, pp. 84–89.

McAlister, Elaine. "Film as Historical Text: Danton," in John D. Simons, ed., Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1994, pp. 63–73.

Milosz, Czeslaw. The History of Polish Literature. 2nd ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983.

Nowicki, Ron. Warsaw: The Cabaret Years. San Francisco, CA: Mercury House, 1992.

Przybyszewska, Stanislawa. The Danton Case–Thermidor: Two Plays. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989.

John Haag , Associate Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia