Stanisław Wyspiański

• Born: January 15, 1869
• Birthplace: Krakow, Poland
• Died: November 28, 1907
• Place of death: Krakow, Poland

Other Literary Forms

Collaborating with Stanisław Przybyszewski on the periodical Życie (life), Stanisław Wyspiański contributed plays and essays in addition to serving as the magazine’s art director. He began his career with paintings and pastels and was active as an interior designer, often designing sets for his own productions. Among his many architectural plans are a cycle of drawings of monuments, a project for a Polish acropolis, and an amphitheater. He also helped to renovate and rebuild the cathedral of the Waweł Castle in Krakow, designing stained glass and tapestries, some of which were unfinished at his death. Wyspiański translated and adapted the plays of others, including Pierre Corneille, Adam Mickiewicz, and William Shakespeare. He also wrote a few lyric poems called “rhapsodies,” the majority of which reflect his love for Krakow, as well as his infatuation with Poland’s past; some poems also served as studies that he later developed into dramas.

Achievements

Wyspiański is regarded as the father of modern Polish drama. To appreciate his pioneering role, it is necessary to understand the state of Polish drama before he came on the scene. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Polish people had been subjected to the repressive policies of Prussia, Russia, and Austria, the three nations that partitioned Poland in the 1790’s. The urban centers of Poland were not as developed as those of Western Europe, because many of the Polish gentry, who would normally be significant stimulus for cultural development, lived on isolated estates rather than in cities. It was thus difficult for Polish writers to maintain close contact with the theater, which thrived only in the larger cities and did not serve as an important literary vehicle before the turn of the twentieth century.

During the 1890’s, the literary scene in Poland was undergoing a radical change. The positivist movement was no longer in vogue among young artists; the literary revolution that resulted in the acceptance of the Symbolists, decadents, impressionists, and other modernist groups was spreading rapidly from the West to the East. The intellectuals of Poland could no longer accept the theory that industrialization and scientific advancement would better the future of humankind. They believed that there must be something more to humanity, something more to the human soul that could not be grasped simply by the observation of natural phenomena. The modernist movement in Poland, known as Young Poland (Młoda Polska), turned to the mystical ideas of Polish Romanticism. Pessimism and fear were predominant characteristics of Polish modernism and of the fin de siècle. Young Poland believed that all arts should be unified in a “new” art: By intermingling characteristics and techniques belonging to the various art forms, an artist could produce new art forms with “colors” in music, “music” in literature, and “stories” in painting. The multitalented Wyspiański was uniquely qualified to help bring about this proposed unification of the art forms.

Wyspiański wrote his dramas in the style of Polish lyric poetry, a style that lent an operatic quality to his works. Concerned with the overall atmosphere generated by his works and the impression that would be left with the audience, the playwright concentrated on every aspect of his dramatic production. The Krakow Theater was quite prepared for the reforms Wyspiański was to introduce. Director Tadeusz Pawlikowski , in an attempt to create a sense of responsibility among the actors, taught that every single role, even the most minute, was of great importance to the staging of the play as a whole. No longer were fragmented individual roles the focal point of a play; the entire production was of artistic concern. In his dramas, Wyspiański explored specific moral, philosophical, or national problems. Because his goal was to create a “monumental theater,” he did not present a piece-by-piece psychological analysis of certain characters and did not attempt objectively to represent historical incidents and persons.

Although Wyspiański was one of the key representatives of Young Poland, he did not cling to the program of Polish modernism, according to which “true” art ought not to deliver a political message. In his works, Wyspiański often examined political and historical questions concerning the tragic fate of Poland, emphasizing his own belief in the necessity of a strong Polish state. These nationalistic ideas inspired a number of Poles, reawakening the dream of the Romantics—to restore Poland to its proper place as a unified state in the history of Europe.

Biography

On January 15, 1869, Stanisław Mateusz Ignacy Wyspiański was born in Krakow, the old capital of Poland. His father, Franciszek, was a sculptor whose workshop was at the foot of Waweł Castle. There, as a young boy, Wyspiański had his first exposure to art and to the past of Poland, which could be said to be housed on the hill in Waweł Castle. It is quite clear from one of Wyspiański’s poems, in which he recalls his father’s atelier, that his visits to his father’s shop left a lasting impression on him. His mother, Maria (neé Rogowska), was from an old Krakow family that strongly supported independence for Poland. She began teaching her son about the past greatness of his country and planted the seeds of Polish nationalism in him at an early age. She died when Wyspiański was only six years old, and his education continued in the household of his aunt, Joanna Stankiewiczowa.

Wyspiański attended Saint Anne’s gymnasium from 1879 to 1887. From 1887 to 1890 he was under the guidance of Jan Matejko at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow while studying philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. Between the years of 1889 and 1890, he worked on the decoration of the Mariacki church as an assistant to Jan Matejko. Matejko taught Wyspiański to be observant and to capture even the minutest details in the representation of a certain event. In Wyspiański’s masterpiece, The Wedding, characters such as Stanczyk, Wernyhora, and Hetman were taken directly from the canvases of Matejko’s monumental works.

Having completed this early phase of his studies, Wyspiański embarked on a journey that led him to many of the cultural centers of Europe. He visited Prague, and cities in Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France. It was a golden opportunity, for Wyspiański’s museum visits later served as the inspiration for his dramatic productions. While in Dresden and Munich, Wyspiański became acquainted with the works of Richard Wagner, whom he fervently admired and whose artistic style greatly influenced him.

Wyspiański spent almost three years in Paris at a time when Polish artists were not very familiar with European modernism. There he was introduced to new trends in paintings and drama; he attended avant-garde and naturalistic plays as well as productions of Shakespearean and classical Greek theater, and he became very interested in contemporary playwrights such as Maurice Maeterlinck, Gerhart Hauptmann, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg. Contact with the already well-developed and strongly rooted modernist movement widened the young Wyspiański’s perspectives and artistic goals. He rapidly evolved as a painter, writer, dramatist, and stage designer. It was in Paris, during the years from 1891 to 1893 that he wrote his first two plays, Królowa polskiej korony (the queen of the Polish crown) and Daniel.

When he returned to Krakow, Wyspiański was not yet convinced that his specific medium should be the theater, and he devoted most of his energies to his paintings and decorative work. In 1898, he was appointed as the art director of Życie, a magazine under the editorship of Przybyszewski, who was instrumental in forwarding the Young Poland movement. Legenda and Warszawianka were published in 1898, marking Wyspiański’s literary debut. Wyspiański’s most successful drama, The Wedding, premiered in Krakow on March 16, 1901. Suffering from syphilis, and aware that there was little or no hope of curing the disease, he wrote his dramas hastily, often not refining them artistically. His literary career was short-lived, lasting only ten years. He died at the age of thirty-eight, on November 28, 1907, in Krakow.

Analysis

Stanisław Wyspiański was not in total agreement with his fellow representatives of Young Poland, who believed that art should not contain a political message. He was convinced that the nationalistic and ideological functions of art were as important as their aesthetic functions. In his works, he presented personal views on Poland’s political situation. According to the critic J. Z. Jakubowski, Wyspiański was convinced that contemporary Polish society was intellectually backward, totally unaware of contemporary art, and content with the country’s political situation. Wyspiański believed that this backward, unaware condition caused the unfortunate political situation in which the Polish people found themselves. In an attempt to liberate the dreams of the Poles, Wyspiański satirized his own era in his dramas. He expounded a “monumental drama” that would contain an elemental moral evaluation of life and human actions. Influenced by the Greek theater, Wyspiański created key scenes designed to frighten the audience and arouse empathy. Using rhythm, music, and lighting effects, he was able to create a type of mass hypnosis in the audience. By creating such an atmosphere within the theater, he was able to place his viewer in a world on the border between realism and symbolism. In this manner, Wyspiański’s theater became both the past and the present.

Wyspiański’s dramas fit into distinct groups according to their thematic content. These classifications include dramas written in the classical Greek style (The Return of Odysseus, Achilleis), Krakow tradition tragedies (Legenda, Bolesław Śmiały), dramas based on Polish insurrections (Noc listopadowa, Warszawianka), and two satiric plays (The Wedding, Wyzwolenie).

In his dramas there is often a unification of two conflicting philosophical thoughts. Of interest in this respect is the dual-planed construction of several of Wyspiański’s dramas. The technique that Wyspiański uses to “divide” the action into different planes has been called “live rocks” (żywe kamienie) or “live paintings” (żywe obrazy) by many critics. Monuments, historical figures, and characters from paintings come to life and add to the action of Wyspiański’s dramas.

Akropolis

Akropolis, a four-act play written in 1904, serves as a good example of Wyspiański’s “living rock” technique. The action of the drama takes place after midnight on the eve of Easter Sunday. It is set among the monuments and other reminders of Poland’s past in Waweł cathedral. On the main altar, the silver angels who hold the casket of Saint Stanislaw begin to move and speak to one another. They leave the casket behind and wander through the cathedral, bringing other statues to life, urging the monuments to live, to love, and even to forget their past. The culmination of act 1, and Wyspiański’s message, is contained in the monologue of Clio, the muse of history, who exclaims that the souls of those buried at Waweł will return to earth after many years, after the cathedral is destroyed. Act 1 consists of a resounding cry of life over death: The statutes are brought to life only after they forget the past.

As the play progresses, it becomes more and more fantastic. In this parable of death and resurrection, not only do statues move about and speak, but also figures from the past step down from old tapestries and begin to engage in discourse. Mythological deities, Greek heroes, and Polish historical figures come to life and communicate with one another. Act 2 thrusts the reader into the world of Homer’s Iliad (c. 750 b.c.e.; English translation, 1611), and act 3, into the biblical story of Jacob.

Act 2 features scenes of courtship between Helen and Paris, as Hector prepares for battle. Wyspiański presents these two episodes in a paradoxical manner in order to emphasize the primary theme of the play: the victory of life over death. In Akropolis, the trite, almost silly actions of lovers Helen and Paris are seen as morally equivalent to the heroic deed of Hector, who loses his life in patriotic battle. Life and its pleasures are contrasted favorably with heroism and death; Wyspiański suggests that Hector’s heroic action ultimately had no effect on humankind’s destiny.

The rivalry, in act 3, between the brothers Jacob and Esau again promotes the play’s main theme. The biblical story of Jacob as presented in Akropolis tends to justify criminal actions in human beings’ quest for power as long as life is lived to the fullest, echoing Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman, who is above judgment.

The action of Akropolis culminates in act 4 with the destruction of the cathedral and the triumphant entry of Christ, events on which the cult of life depends. Wyspiański was in apparent agreement with the anarchists of the nineteenth century, who believed that in order to build something new, one must destroy all of the old. Wyspiański believed that the Polish people were obsessed with their heroic past, and that this obsession led to an inability to act as a nation. The destruction of the cathedral is the destruction of a myth that prevented Poles from acting with resolve.

Akropolis was a bold experiment in which Waweł cathedral symbolizes the temple that houses the soul of humankind and from which it is freed at the end. By introducing different historical planes depicting moments of humanity’s greatness and weakness at the same time, Wyspiański enables the reader to identify with the different symbols. He did not intend the transitions between the three different planes in Akropolis to be very smooth; the reader receives only a glimpse of the past, which is then destroyed.

The Wedding

In The Wedding, considered Wyspiański’s masterpiece, the playwright chose to explore several contemporary issues that plagued his generation. For this work, which has been called one of the most distinguished and original works of Polish dramatic poetry, Wyspiański exploited the extreme populist ideas that then dominated the intellectual scene. The peasant, glorified by the intelligentsia, was considered to be the salvation of Poland, the backbone of the nation, and an integral part of any movement that would restore the country’s autonomy. Wyspiański, as did several of his contemporaries, married a peasant girl in an attempt to ally himself with the class that would ultimately be his country’s salvation. The Wedding is based on an actual event—the marriage of a fellow artist, Luejan Rydel, to a beautiful peasant girl in a village near Krakow. On a November evening in this village, guests from the intelligentsia meet with peasants who gather together to celebrate a wedding.

The setting is a room of the celebration house in which all the other guests are dancing and enjoying themselves. Here, several conversations between various guests take place. The dialogues are usually between two people, a characteristic of the szopka, traditional puppet theater staged in Krakow. The differences between the two social groups attending the wedding and the political atmosphere of the times are made apparent in the course of these conversations. Although the Polish gentry, especially those of the artistic community, have proclaimed that the peasant is essential to the development of a new Poland, they are not prepared to grant the peasant all those rights normally associated with freedom and a free country. The Editor, head of a conservative newspaper, in his conversation with Czepiec, a peasant, voices his opinion that the peasant has no need for any knowledge of the world outside his village. Throughout the evening, events follow a similar trend. Members of the gentry engage in conversation with members of the peasantry, and the differences between the two classes become more obvious. Even the Groom and the Bride do not communicate well. The Bride, after listening to the Groom’s poetic confession of how much he loves her, can only exclaim that her shoes are uncomfortable. In these opening scenes, Wyspiański expresses the view that the unity of the two classes, so anxiously sought after in Poland at the turn of the century, was not a goal that could be soon realized. Wyspiański also informs the viewer through Czepiec’s words that the peasants are ready to fight for Poland, as soon as their services are requested. The dialogues in act 1 quite clearly reflect that the peasants do not possess the knowledge necessary to interact fully with the upper class, but the peasants’ desire for action and a free Poland make them more compatible with the gentry than the gentry might believe.

The realistic nature of act 1 begins to change with the entrance of Rachel, a young Jewish girl who claims to be moderne. The dialogues among the guests become more poetic, and the celebration in the house becomes more passionate. Near the close of the first act, Rachel entertains the idea of inviting to the wedding the symbolic Mulch (Chochoł, a rose bush wrapped in straw for the winter). The Poet, Bride, and Groom take up this idea and invite the Mulch and any one else the Mulch wishes to bring to the wedding.

The Wedding provides another example of Wyspiański’s division of the action into different planes via “live paintings.” The characters who visit the wedding seem to come from the painting that hangs above the Host’s desk—a painting depicting a peasant uprising with Wernyhora, a semilegendary bard. Again, these characters are not human characters but inanimate objects that speak out for the Polish cause. Act 2 is effective because Wyspiański skillfully leads the characters of the play, the viewers, and the readers into this symbolic world. The atmosphere created by Wyspiański is of great importance to this smooth transition. Short flashes of action and dialogue against the background of a loud wedding create a hypnotic effect. The rhythm of the dialogue adds to the overall musical or operatic quality of the play. Colors on the stage change quite rapidly because the costumes of the nobles and the peasants contrast as much as the dialects in which the characters speak. The movement of the dialogues, the actors, and the scenes increases in intensity at the close of act 1 and provides the momentum leading into the wonderful fantasy of act 2.

The Mulch announces that there will be an abundance of guests at the celebration. Soon, the spirits of the past begin arriving, and they engage in conversation with one guest at a time. To the Poet appears the knight Zawisza Czarny, who fought the Prussians in the Battle of Grunwald. The Groom sees the ghost of Hetman, who earlier betrayed Poland’s cause to Moscow. An old man at the wedding sees the spirit of Szela, who served the Austrian monarchy by exterminating the Polish nobility. Stanczyk, a court jester in 1540, appears to the Editor. Stanczyk is a very negative spirit, a voice of the unproductive past, and a reflection of the Editor himself. The Editor, like Stanczyk, is very pessimistic. He sees no future, choosing instead to look for the future in the past. On leaving the Editor, Stanczyk hands him his caduceus, instructing the Editor to muddy the waters with it. The name Stanczyk was also associated with a conservative Krakow political group of the nineteenth century. Wyspiański emphasizes in this scene that the conservative policies of the past, represented by the Stanczyk political party, have no place in Poland’s future.

Perhaps the most important moment in act 2 is the appearance of Wernyhora, the semilegendary Ukrainian bard whose prophecies concerning Poland were utilized by several Polish writers. Adam Mickiewicz portrayed Wernyhora as a prophet of the resurrection of Poland. According to Juliusz Słowacki’s Beniowski (1841), Wernyhora was to return in the future to point out the king of prophets. Wyspiański’s Wernyhora comes atop a huge white stallion to visit the Host and hands him a golden horn with which the Host is to call the countryside to arms. Wernyhora instructs the Host to ride to Warsaw with the banner and call together the Sejm (a parliamentary assembly), thus leading the nation to insurrection. After Wernyhora leaves, the Host entrusts the golden horn, symbol of the insurrection, to a peasant at the wedding. The Host also instructs another peasant to call all peasants to arms; they are to gather at daybreak and wait for their orders.

These spirits are visions from the internal psyche of the characters taking on human, even superhuman, forms in order to engage in a polemic with their witnesses. The visions of act 2 thus become more real than reality itself. The monologues of the spirits more clearly reflect the convictions of the characters in the play who are representatives of contemporary Polish society. Act 2 also introduces a historical perspective to the play. The political situation in which Poland found itself at the time of The Wedding becomes clearer when compared to the historical periods that the spirits represent. The spirits symbolize deeds and persons, both heroic and cowardly. They also represent Poland’s past glory. The interaction of these spirits with the other more realistic characters causes the border between the real and the supernatural to shift and disappear. Although the action is minimal, there is much dramatic tension as a result of this interplay between worlds.

In act 3, the apparitions disappear, and the viewer is returned to the wedding party. Some of the guests are drunk, and there is no mention of the activities that took place only moments earlier. It is as though the ghosts from Poland’s past had never been there. One of the events that occurred during the unusual night is mentioned for the first time in act 3: The Bride dreamed that she was being taken through forests and villages by devils who told her that they were looking for Poland. Now, curious as to the meaning of this dream, she asks the Poet for his interpretation. He tells her that the Poland for which she is looking cannot be found anywhere on earth but that it exists in the heart.

The majority of the conversations among the guests in act 3 are very similar to those of act 1. The cold reality of the present seems to have returned. The peasants, who were instructed by the Host to gather at dawn and wait for their orders, clearly remember the strange happenings of the night. The city guests and the Host are quite surprised when they see the peasants gathering near the house before dawn. The Host is reminded of his night visitor, and, after some time, the events of the evening become somewhat more clear to him. The guests all wait for something to happen and are excited when they hear the sound of a horse’s hooves. The peasant whose mission it was to blow the golden horn enters the yard, but the horn is lost. The symbol of insurrection is no longer in the people’s hands. The play closes as the Mulch puts all the guests into a trance. He then leads them in a slow dance, reflecting the powerless nature of contemporary Polish thought.

Wyspiański the pessimist was very much like the nobility who wait for the miracle at the end of The Wedding: He entrusted the mission of leading Poland to freedom to fate. From The Wedding emerges a clear message: The gentry, after telling the peasants that they are to be the salvation of Poland and calling them to arms and action, are incapable of leading, unable to make the final, crucial call to arms. Like the Host, they are armed only with rhetoric and lack the confidence to be leaders. As the Host gave away the golden horn, so the gentry have abdicated their responsibility for true change in their country. Audiences at the turn of the century did not understand the satiric nature of Wyspiański’s masterpiece; the true meaning of The Wedding was understood only after Wyspiański’s death.

Having experienced European modernism in one of the key centers of “new” art, Paris, Wyspiański brought his knowledge and creativity to the theater of Krakow. His mastery of different artistic media enabled him to unify the different art forms, a key point in the many manifestos of the modernists. Wyspiański is not noted for developing the psychological side of characters in his works, but he did contribute to the growth of the Polish psychological drama. Through his two-leveled construction, Wyspiański was able to explore the inner feelings of his characters. In addition, this construction allowed him to make brilliant use of the space beyond the stage. Not only did Wyspiański propagate the ideas of the Polish modernist movement, but he also introduced a healthy argument against one of the principal theories of Przybyszewski.

According to the program of Young Poland, art should not concern itself with politics but rather constitute a revelation of the naked soul. Throughout The Wedding and many of his other works, Wyspiański accused the contemporary Polish artist of being unwilling to do battle with the foes of Poland. He ridiculed the artists of his generation for reaching into the past for heroic themes while remaining unable to perform heroic deeds themselves.

Bibliography

Coates, Paul. “Revolutionary Spirits: The Wedding of Wajda and Wyspiański.” Literature/Film Quarterly 20, no. 2 (1992): 127. Coates compares and contrasts Wyspiański’s The Wedding with Andrzej Wajda’s film version.

Kraszewski, Charles S. “Stanisław Wyspiański as Proselytising Translator: National Directioning in His Polonisations of Hamlet and Le Cid.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 35, nos. 3-4 (September, 1993): 305. This study focuses on Wyspiański’s translations into Polish of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid and the strategy he pursued.

Romanowska, Marta. Stanisław Wyspiański Museum: Branch of the National Museum in Cracow: A Guide Book. Krakow: The National Museum, 1998. This guidebook to the museum for Wyspiański provides some insights into his life.

Terlecki, Tymon. Stanisław Wyspiański. Boston: Twayne, 1983. A general biography of Wyspiański that covers his life and works. Bibliography and index.