Stanisława Przybyszewska

Stanisława Przybyszewska (1901 - 1935) was a Polish dramatist who wrote almost exclusively about the French Revolution. Plays concerning other historical occurrences, including the Spanish Inquisition, and later attempts at more commercially-oriented drama, were for the most part not completed and remain unknown. Her play "The Danton Case", which examines the conflict between Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, is considered to be one of the most exemplary literary works about the Revolution, and was adapted (albeit with major ideological edits) by Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda for his 1983 film "Danton".

Przybyszewska was born Stanisława Pajak, the illegitimate child of artist Aniela Pajak and writer Stanisław Przybyszewski -- a famous and notoriously dissolute modernist who was one of the founding members of the Young Poland movement. As a child, Przybyszewska traveled across Europe with her mother, living in Lwów, Paris, Zurich, and Vienna. Following the death of her mother in 1912, Przybyszewska lived with an aunt before reuniting with her father in 1919. It was her father who introduced Przybyszewska, during her brief stint as a philosophy student at Poznan University, to morphine, which she began to use heavily.

In 1921, Przybyszewska married Jan Panienski, an artist and fellow morphine addict whom she met in Kraków. Following his death from an overdose in 1924, Przybyszewska drifted into a lonely and fanatical obsession with the French Revolution, dating her letters (of which she wrote many, to recipients as diverse as her father and Thomas Mann) by the French Republican Calendar. Increasingly mentally unstable and desperately poor, she spent the last years of her life living in a tiny, unheated garret in Gdańsk (Danzig), painting her food with Lysol to preserve it and devoting herself to dramatizing the Revolution.

Przybyszewska was fixated upon Maximilien Robespierre, and attributed to him, in her writing, extraordinary brilliance and powers of foresight. "I have the calm certainty," she wrote to a friend, "that I understand Robespierre better than anyone whose works are known to me." Przybyszewska attributed her own Communist opinions to Robespierre, and depicted him predicting the disastrous rise of capitalism. Robespierre was the central figure in both of her surviving plays: "The Danton Case", which was completed in 1929, and an earlier play, "Thermidor", which remained unfinished at the time of her death in 1935.

Przybyszewska died still obscure yet convinced of her own genius, finding solace only in history, utterly isolated from the modern world. Hilary Mantel remarks of her that "tuberculosis, morphine and malnutrition were adduced as the causes of death, but [Przybyszewska] could more truthfully be diagnosed as the woman who died of Robespierre." [ [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/mant01_.html LRB · Hilary Mantel: ‘What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!’ ] at www.lrb.co.uk]

References

* Kosicka, Jadwiga & Gerould, Daniel (1987). "A Life of Solitude: Stanislawa Przybyszewska: A Biographical Study With Selected Letters." Quartet Books. ISBN 0704325977
* Przybyszewska, Stanislawa & Taborski, Boleslaw (1989). "The Danton Case/Thermidor: Two Plays". Northwestern University Press. ISBN 0810108062

Further reading

* [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/mant01_.html Hilary Mantel: "What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!"]
* [http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/499/kosicka.html A Life of Solitude (Sarmatian Review)]