Aleksander Fredro

• Born: June 20, 1793
• Birthplace: Surochów, Galicia (now in Poland)
• Died: July 15, 1876
• Place of death: Lwów, Austrian Galicia (now Lviv, Ukraine)

Other Literary Forms

Aleksander Fredro wrote autobiographical and patriotic poetry intermittently throughout his adult life. These poems, however, are not of major importance. Also of modest literary merit is Fredro’s only novel, Nieszczęścia najszczęśliwego męża (1841; the misfortunes of the happiest husband). On the other hand, his posthumously published book of reminiscences, Trzy po trzy (1880; topsy-turvy talk), has been acclaimed as one of the masterworks of Polish prose. This work, apparently written in the late 1840’s, is composed in a style similar to the one employed in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Fredro’s Trzy po trzy, moreover, is highly esteemed by Polish historians as a firsthand account of the nation’s military participation in the Napoleonic Wars. Another noteworthy work of nonfiction is the collection of sardonic aphorisms posthumously printed under the title Zapiski starucha (1880; notes of an old man).

Achievements

The most productive phase in Aleksander Fredro’s literary career as a writer of comedy coincided with the Romantic epoch in Polish literature. Yet Fredro was relatively unaffected by its literary tenets. In the period following the suppression of the November Insurrection of 1831, moreover, the most prominent Polish writers—men such as Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, and Zygmunt Krasiński—believed that those who engage in literary activity are morally obliged to act as adjuncts to the cause of national restoration. Owing to the lack of any overt political content in his comedies, Fredro’s achievements in this genre tended to be underrated by a literary establishment that had been seduced by the siren song of Romanticism. It was not until after the debacle of the January Insurrection of 1863 that the Polish intelligentsia appeared to wash its collective hands of the doctrines of Romanticism and abandoned the quixotic quest for national independence by means of political conspiracy and armed rebellion. This change in the climate of opinion permitted an objective reappraisal of Fredro’s merits as a playwright, and he was henceforth duly recognized as the foremost writer of comedy in the annals of Polish theatrical history.

Biography

The entire territory of the Polish Commonwealth was divided up by its neighbors in a series of partitions that occurred in 1772, 1793, and 1795. As a result of the first partition, the southern area of Poland that is commonly designated as Galicia came under Austrian rule, and it was in the eastern part of this region that Aleksander Fredro was born on June 20, 1793. His birth took place in a manor house of a country estate belonging to his family that was located at Surochów, near Jarosław. His parents, Jacek and Maria Fredro, had a total of nine offspring, six of whom were boys. Among these were two older brothers, Maksymilian and Seweryn, who were to exert a strong influence on their younger sibling. Aleksander’s father, for his part, was a prosperous member of the landowning gentry, who managed to obtain the hereditary title of count from the Austrian regime, chiefly by virtue of a talent for business that enabled him to accumulate a vast personal fortune through the purchase of other estates. Aleksander received the conventional education befitting the son of a country squire on the family estate of Beńkowa Wisznia near Lwów, a city of forty thousand inhabitants that served as the capital of Galicia. On the death of his mother in 1806, Aleksander’s family took up residence in Lwów proper. The fourteen-year-old boy was also concurrently deprived of the company of both older brothers, for it was decided to enhance their education by having them serve at the court of a powerful Galician magnate named Adam Czartoryski.

When Fredro was coming of age, the greater part of the Polish gentry came to believe that Napoleon Bonaparte represented the best hope for the restoration of Poland’s independence. All three occupying powers—Russia, Prussia, and Austria—were united in a continental coalition whose aim it was to thwart the political ambitions of the French emperor. In order to exploit Polish money and manpower on behalf of his military ventures, Napoleon held out the prospect of national restoration as a reward for services rendered to his cause. Shortly after inflicting a crushing defeat on the Prussians at Jena in 1806, Napoleon set up a modest political entity known as the Duchy of Warsaw, consisting of those areas that Prussia had annexed during the partitions of 1793 and 1795. The Polish army itself was then reconstituted under the command of Prince Józef Poniatowski, a nephew of the last king of Poland. Owing to another overwhelming French victory over Austrian forces at Wagram in 1809, the territory of the Duchy was subsequently expanded to include the area that was occupied by Austria in 1795. As soon as Poniatowski’s men marched into Galicia in support of the French, both Maksymilian and Seweryn decided to enlist. Fredro, though only a teenager, was quick to follow the example set by his older brothers and he, too, became a member of Poniatowski’s army. Within a few months, Fredro was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in an elite cavalry unit. After two further years of service, moreover, he rose to the rank of captain. During this same period, he also led an active social life and cut a gallant figure in many a fashionable salon in the district of Lublin, where he was stationed.

The course of Fredro’s life altered abruptly when, in the spring of 1812, Napoleon launched a grandiose military operation against Russia for the purpose of coercing Czar Alexander to join a continental alliance in opposition to England. The move to attack the czar met with enthusiastic approbation from a majority of the Polish gentry, for they envisioned the recovery of the Russian-occupied eastern provinces in the aftermath of a French victory. Poland contributed 100,000 men to the multinational army of 500,000 men that crossed the Russian frontier: All but 20,000 of the Poles were destined to perish during the ill-fated campaign against the forces of the czar. Although most Polish soldiers were assigned to multinational units of the invasion force, Prince Poniatowski was given command of an exclusively national contingent of 35,000 men that was designated as the Fifth Army Corps. Fredro and his older brothers served in this Polish Corps, and it therefore fell to their lot to be in the vanguard of the initial attack and in the rearguard of the subsequent retreat. Despite such hazards, each of the three brothers came through the campaign without permanent injury. Owing to a case of typhus, which he contracted during the retreat, however, Fredro was captured by the Russians and imprisoned in a military hospital located near Wilno. Shortly after recovering, he managed to escape and eventually rejoined Poniatowski’s forces in time to participate in the last desperate battles that the Grande Armée fought against a reactivated anti-French coalition consisting of Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Poniatowski, notwithstanding several offers of amnesty on the part of the czar, proved steadfast in his commitment to Napoleon and died heroically in the savage three-day struggle known as the Battle of Nations, which was fought near Leipzig during the autumn of 1813. Further defeats of his forces on French soil led to the emperor’s abdication at Fontainebleau on April 6, 1814.

The remnant of the Polish Corps—then under the command of General Wincenty Krasiński—was subsequently repatriated to its homeland, where it was to form the nucleus of the armed forces of the czarist protectorate that was established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and officially designated as the Kingdom of Poland. Fredro and Seweryn chose to be discharged in June, 1814, so as to assist their father in the management of his properties, and Maksymilian decided to remain in military service. In addition to receiving high honors from France in recognition of his valorous service in the emperor’s cause, Fredro was also awarded his own country’s highest military decoration, the Order of the Virtuti Militari.

After his discharge from the army, Fredro returned to Austrian-occupied Galicia by way of Vienna. There he made the acquaintance of Countess Zofia Skarbek (née Jabłonowska), a young woman trapped in an unhappy marriage to a powerful magnate. The attraction that he felt for Zofia proved to be mutual, and they maintained contact with each other once back in Galicia. Fredro took up residence in a village near the estate of Beńkowa Wisznia, whose management had been entrusted to his brother Seweryn. More than a decade later, Fredro moved into Beńkowa Wisznia when his father’s health deteriorated abruptly, and he continued to reside there from that time onward. His father died in 1828, and in the same year Fredro was finally able to wed Zofia. They had formed a permanent relationship in 1819, but their wedding had to be deferred until her marriage to Count Skarbek was formally annulled. They subsequently had a son, Jan Aleksander, in 1829, and a daughter, Zofia, in 1837.

Fredro, while still a member of the Polish Corps in France, took the opportunity to attend the theaters in Paris and thereby familiarized himself with the plays of Molière as well as those of more recent French writers of comedy. His own literary career began in earnest a few years after his discharge from military service. He achieved a modest success with a comedy in one act entitled Intryga na prędce (intrigue in a hurry) when it was staged in Lwów in March of 1817. This work was soon followed by a number of full-length plays, as well as an occasional one-act play, which met with increasing approbation on the part of the public. These literary activities were temporarily interrupted by the terminal illness of his father and later by the outbreak of the November Insurrection in 1830. Even though this uprising was confined to the Russian-occupied region of Poland, Fredro feared that it might spread to Galicia. For safety’s sake, he thought it best to move to Vienna along with his wife and infant son until the cessation of hostilities. Soon after the capitulation of Warsaw on September 8, 1831, Fredro and his family returned to Galicia, and he once again resumed the career of dramatist with great zeal. In 1835, however, the Romantic poet Seweryn Goszczyński published an article in which he dismissed Fredro’s plays as second-rate imitations of foreign models whose content did nothing to foster the cause of Polish independence. Emotionally devastated by these charges, as well as by other critics’ attacks against him, Fredro did not find the courage to write another play until the early 1850’s. He did, however, continue to work intermittently on other literary projects, including the preparation of a new and expanded edition of his collected writings.

Throughout this period, Fredro also managed to play an active role in the political life of Galicia. His efforts to promote sorely needed social and political reforms in his native province were, however, seriously compromised by his son’s decision to join the Polish legions, under the command of General Józef Bem, which had gone to the aid of the Hungarian insurgents engaged in a struggle against the forces of the Habsburg emperor during the Revolution of 1848. After the Hungarian revolt was crushed, Fredro’s son found himself banished from all territory under the control of Austria, and he eventually took up residence in Paris. In subsequent years, his parents spent more time in the French capital than they did in Galicia. On one of his visits to his homeland, Fredro compounded his political difficulties by delivering a seditious speech to the members of a Polish patriotic organization and was subjected to a lengthy legal inquiry that ended with his formal acquittal on March 8, 1854. Three years later, his son was also politically rehabilitated and permitted to return home. In the 1850’s, Fredro resumed writing plays; none of these late works, however, was produced or published during his lifetime. With his family in attendance, Fredro died on July 15, 1876, in Lwów, the city where the majority of his earlier plays had received their premiere performances. Lwów today is called L’vov and is located within the Ukraine.

Analysis

Before 1835, the year when he was unjustly vilified in Goszczyński’s article “Nowa epoka poezji polskiej” (the new epoch of Polish poetry), Aleksander Fredro had already written some twenty plays for the theater. Fredro’s reputation as Poland’s greatest writer of comedy still rests on those works that were written and produced prior to 1835.

Pan Geldhab

His first full-length play was called Pan Geldhab (a title that may be literally rendered as “Mister Has Money” or more colloquially as “Mister Moneybags”). The theme of this three-act comedy in verse manifests a strong affinity with Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (pr. 1670; The Would-Be Gentleman, 1675). Pan Geldhab is a rich merchant who seeks to enhance his own social status by marrying his daughter to a titled aristocrat who is desperately in need of money. Even though the daughter is already engaged to an impoverished member of the gentry who genuinely loves her, she readily acquiesces to her father’s plans. To forestall this scheme from being implemented, her fiancé challenges the aristocrat to a duel. The aristocrat, who has in the meantime come into a sizable inheritance from his late aunt, has no desire to risk his life over a woman whom he does not really love and promptly withdraws his offer of marriage. In the light of these events, the merchant is now willing to allow his daughter to marry her fiancé. The young man is, however, thoroughly disgusted with the antics of both father and daughter and therefore decides to have nothing further to do with either of them. While the play is not overtly didactic, it fully reflects Molière’s dictum that “the purpose of comedy is to correct men by entertaining them.”

Husband and Wife

Plots involving marital infidelity have been used with great frequency by writers of comedy throughout the ages, and it may seem that there is little room for novelty in works of this type. Fredro, however, takes a strikingly new approach to this theme in the play entitled Husband and Wife. Here, four persons who are both young and attractive engage in multiple breaches of trust. The scene is set in the town residence of Count Wacław, the husband of a woman named Elwira. Finding his marital relationship with Elwira to be routine and unexciting, he attempts to find amorous titillation by engaging in a romantic dalliance with his wife’s servant, Justysia. His closest personal friend, Alfred, decides to take advantage of the disarray that prevails within the Count’s household and proceeds to seduce Elwira. Before long, however, Alfred himself comes to find his relationship with Elwira somewhat tiresome and therefore enters into an amatory liaison with Justysia as well. This soubrette manages deftly to balance the needs of her two lovers, but her duplicity is finally uncovered and she is forced to enter a convent against her will. Count Wacław proves to be far more charitable toward Elwira and Alfred, however, and readily forgives both of them in view of their apparent repentance. The play ends with the Count, Elwira, and Alfred pledging to observe mutual fidelity in their future relations. In addition to the novelty of the plot, Husband and Wife is noteworthy for its metrical virtuosity. Whereas convention dictated the use of a thirteen-syllable line with a caesura after the seventh syllable for all lines of dialogue, Fredro composed lines of varying length so as to achieve greater expressiveness by having the number of syllables in a line match the mood of the speaker.

Ladies and Hussars

As a lighthearted comedy, Ladies and Hussars is generally considered to be at least equal, if not superior, to Husband and Wife. Ladies and Hussars is also noteworthy for being one of the few plays that Fredro composed in prose before 1835, when the first phase of his career as a writer of comedy came to an abrupt end. Being in prose, the dialogue in Ladies and Hussars presents few obstacles to the process of translation and suffers very little when recast into another tongue. The play takes place during the period when the army of Prince Józef Poniatowski seized the province of Galicia in 1809 and is set on a country estate belonging to a character designated as the Major. While on official leave, the Major plays host to a captain and a lieutenant from his own regiment, as well as to a pair of older hussars. Suddenly, this exclusively masculine domain is invaded by the Major’s three sisters. Of these sisters, two are married and the third is a spinster. Also members of the party are three vivacious maids in their employ and a pretty young woman named Zofia, who is the Major’s niece. The sole purpose of the sisters’ visit is to persuade their old bachelor brother to marry his niece. Before long, the Major accedes to their wishes and agrees to marry Zofia. Things get a bit out of hand, however, when his spinster sister gets herself engaged to the captain and one of the maids becomes betrothed to one of the old hussars. The Major is the first to recognize the folly of the situation and cancels his nuptial plans. The other males are quick to follow suit. Once all of these mismatches have been eliminated, the way is clear for a marital union between a true pair of lovers: Zofia and the young lieutenant. Although lacking in seriousness of purpose, Ladies and Hussars has proved itself to be a favorite among Polish theatergoers.

Maidens’ Vows

Maidens’ Vows is, on one level, a comedy that aims at contravening the tragic view of love that pervades the writings of the Romanticists. The dramatic embodiment of Fredro’s anti-Romantic sentiments is the central figure of Gustaw, whose attitude toward life in general is a combination of both realism and optimism. With intentional irony, Fredro selected the name of Gustaw, because it had previously been used by Adam Mickiewicz to designate the arch-Romantic protagonist in part 3 of his projected poetic tetralogy titled Dziady (1823, 1832; Forefathers’ Eve, 1925, 1944-1946). By calling attention to the disparity between their respective heroes in this odd way, Fredro hoped to underscore the anti-Romantic aspect of Maidens’ Vows.

As the play opens, Gustaw’s uncle, Radost, is attempting to promote a marriage between his nephew and a young lady named Aniela. Her mother also favors the match, but Aniela’s cousin, Klara, has talked her into making a vow that neither of them is ever to marry. Accordingly, Aniela refuses Gustaw’s offer and Klara rejects her own suitor, Albin. Gustaw, however, is determined to get Aniela to break her vow and devises a clever stratagem to activate the magnetism of the heart. He makes Aniela into his confidante and pretends to be in love with another woman who bears the same name as she does. She soon finds her resolve to remain immune to the passions of the heart weakening when Gustaw, feigning an injury to his hand, dictates a letter to her that is addressed to the imaginary Aniela. Shortly thereafter, Gustaw reveals the true state of affairs to Aniela, and she is quick to accept his offer of marriage. Gustaw also takes revenge on Klara by tricking her into believing that her father will disinherit her if she does not marry Radost. To circumvent this eventuality, Klara decides to enter into marriage with Albin as the lesser of two evils. Except for The Vengeance, no other play of Fredro’s ranks as high as Maidens’ Vows in terms of both critical and popular esteem.

The Vengeance

There can be little doubt that The Vengeance represents the high point of Fredro’s career as a writer of comedy. Many critics also consider it to be the finest of all Polish comedies irrespective of period. The plot of the play is extremely complex and revolves around a quarrel between two neighbors over the boundaries dividing their estates. One of them is an elderly nobleman who bears the archaic hereditary title of “royal cupbearer” (czesnik) and the other is a petty lawyer who is proud to hold the rank of “notary” (rejent). When the lawyer takes it on himself to hire masons to erect a wall that will separate the two properties, the nobleman instructs his own servants to drive away the masons. To even the score, the lawyer pressures his son, Wacław, into making a marriage proposal to a rich widow who is the object of the nobleman’s affections. Wacław finds the prospect of marrying the widow most distasteful, for he is secretly in love with the nobleman’s niece, Klara. Furious at the impending marriage between Wacław and the widow, the nobleman has the young man seized and brought to his home. There he forces Wacław to wed Klara. Both the bride and the groom are delighted by this turn of events. The nobleman and the lawyer, for their part, promptly resolve their dispute in the light of the new relationship that now exists between them. Much of the humor in this play stems from the grandiloquent speech of a soldier-braggart named Papkin. While not directly involved in the main events of the play, this impoverished hanger-on is always on hand to add a touch of drollery to the happenings. The other major characters are depicted more realistically, and the play as a whole presents a vivid tableau of the traditional Polish manners and customs that prevailed among the gentry with whom Fredro spent his entire life.

Pan Jowialski and The Life Annuity

Two other plays written before 1835 are worthy of mention: Pan Jowialski and The Life Annuity. The former, a work written in prose, may be weak from a dramatic point of view, but it contains innumerable jokes, proverbs, and versified fables that are related by the eponymous hero of the play, whose name is best translated as Mister Joviality. The latter was the last play of Fredro to be produced or published during his own lifetime. In this work, a young rake sells his life annuity to a usurer. As the annuity will lose its value once its official beneficiary dies, the usurer attempts to coerce the young rake into altering his dissolute lifestyle. While this premise is highly amusing, Fredro chooses to focus most of the action on the competition between the young rake and the usurer to win the hand of the same woman.

Late Works

Fredro resumed writing plays in the 1850’s and eventually added another sixteen comedies to his dramatic œuvre. (Most of these works, it should be noted, were written in prose.) Despite a few successful contemporary revivals, none of these late plays has become a permanent part of the classical repertory of the Polish theater.

Bibliography

Gustavsson, Sven, ed. Polish Theatre and Dramatic Technique: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the University of Uppsala on 23 April 1982. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University, 1983. A collection of papers on the history of Polish drama. Bibliography and index.

Krzyżanowski, Julian. A History of Polish Literature. Rev. ed. Warsaw: Pwn-Plish Scientific Publishers, 1978. This history of Polish literature covers the development of Polish literature, including drama, thereby providing background to understanding Fredro. Bibliography and index.

Miłosz, Czesław. The History of Polish Literature. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California, 1983. A general overview of Polish literature that creates a framework for interpreting the role Fredro played in the development of Polish drama. Bibliography and index.

Segel, Harold B. Introduction to The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. Segel’s introduction to his translation of several of Fredro’s works provides both biographical information and literary criticism. Bibliography.