#dziewięćdziesiąty trzeci | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sprawa-przybyszewskiej · 2 years

Text

Multirealities in Stanisława Przybyszewska’s plays

The most common critique of Przybyszewska I encounter everywhere is that she claimed her plays were a "historical chronicle" (an actual subtitle for The Danton Case), while being very obviously biased, belletrised, prejudiced etc., all in all not exactly the impartial retelling a chronicle is supposed to be. This critique permeats all that is written about her plays to the point when while I cannot exactly complain about the lack of resources focused on her (for such a niche personality she does have a dedicated group of scholars, fanalyzing her works and bringing to life all the forgotten bits from the Poznań archives), it seems to me way too much space is focused on these harsh views, and not enough left for enjoying what I consider to be a genius piece of literature.

When I say Przybyszewska was a genius, I don't only mean it in terms of brilliant literary prowess. She was actually a modern renaissance woman, talented in many fields, and if she constantly complained about not being good enough in any of them, it was only because she held herself to unbelievably high standards. Therefore it is simply stupid to assume she actually considered what she knew to be fictional - to be a chronicle. A title is one thing, believing it's true is another and I think the very least we could do in order to understand her and her works better, is to stop treating her like a child who did not pay attention in history clasess.

A small sidenote: Sandor Marai, my favourite Hungarian writer, has a knack for writing all love stories as if they were criminal cases, and the main character was conducting an investigation of sorts. Which makes it very fitting that in one of his most famous novels he introduces us to the concept of "reality versus truth". This seems counterintuitive, but I don't think it really is, and I also think this is something which should be more often applied to Przybyszewska. Too often she is being judged on the basis of having taken "too great a liberty" of assuming somebody's intentions and explanations. People act as if the very fact she wanted to give studying history a try already makes her a writer with an aspiration to be a historical writer. Now, I haven't read Albert Mathiez yet (but it's in my plans, as I don't think anybody can seriously discuss Przybyszewska without getting acquaintanced with Mathiez as well), but I doubt she wanted to write a history book, only better, only in form of a play, after studying Mathiez, much as she liked him.

All this points me to the direction of something I will call "A Prime Theory", and it's not very revolutionary, but it seems to be absolutely crucial to put it in place, because Przybyszewska is constantly being - unfairly - judged on the accordance and compatibility with the historical events, when it should not be the case. The foundation is this: the revolution Przybyszewska described is not The Great French Revolution, but The Great French Revolution'. According to mathematics for every Point, there is Point', identical to the first one but on a flipped side of the axis, so to say. I believe she has described something more akin to a parallel reality, with the general grasp on the events more or less the same that what we know from our history, but with occasional changes and differences. Therefore she did not describe the "reality" of the Revolution but the "truth" of it.

It is possible because the way Marai understood "truth" was that it was the essence, the gist of something much more than the actual chronology or honesty of a situation. The truth is much more personal and what we believe to be true, than what is factual and provable. The first and easier example would be the way she described Robespierre in regards to his physical traits. In every historical account I've read there is some thought dedicated to his fragile health and meagre posture, and Przybyszewska wholeheartedly disagrees, sprinkling small but firm descriptions that work to the contrary; any sign of illness or weakness is in her eyes onlyt emporal, besides, it's not really a weakness if it shows he has undergone (and proved succesful in the endeavour) such a multitude of obstacles any lesser man would have already given up. So even the "negative" traits she flips around so much they become "positive" in the end. They are literally being foils of their original meaning. The gnostic inspirations I have written about in the past have a lot to do with the general idea I'm describing now. The overall duality seems to be interwoven into the text, which is why I cannot treat it as if it were a singular thing. And I haven't even mentioned all the things she outright invents, like bragging about Robespierre's luscious hair (which are hidden under a wig anyway), or comparing him to a tiger or a cat or a dancer, or describing him with the help of a language which is highly metaphorical and imaginative. She is very visibly inventing Robespierre anew - why would she be accused of distorting a portrait of a historical figure, when it is clearly not THE historical figure she put on the stage?

It would also be unfair to judge her in terms of accuracy with history, because she was, after all, not a historian. I need people to understand (it seems funny to write about it, but it's been adressed so much by so many I think I really have to) she was not a bad historical writer, but a brilliant fictional writer. That her fiction resembles our reality so much is a point which still does not warrant reading her plays as historical plays in any way, shape or form. To be honest, I think any kind of factual reading of Przybyszewska's works is not a good idea, because she was so far removed from social and political life, she had so few friends or even just people she kept in contact with, I find it hard to believe she would even know how to describe actual, interpersonal relations, or political lobbies. This is more visible in her prose, but the relationships she's describing don't feel at all natural, and that is not because she was a bad writer - after all she a was a genius writer, with a talent few can match. She was innovative to the point of being incomprehensible by others, and the falsity and lack of natural feeling in the way she saw people is completely due to her lack of expierence of living in a society. This is what I find lacking in the discourse around Przybyszewska - not enough space is dedicated to underlining the fact her life was extraordinary in every aspect. Her life experience was something most people cannot even imagine, and especially this is not something we expect of a writer of her level.

I think I know where this dychotomy in perceiving her comes from: she used mechanical, detached language to describe the misery she lived in, and it seems to be a mascarade a lot of people still buys. It's the same things with the subtitle in TDC - we believe her at face value, completely disregarding the fact she was a writer, she was inventing fictional things all the time! It's like no one (not many people I've read anyway) is able to discern between what she put on display and what was really going on in her life or in her mind. I'm yet to see a good critical paper on her arguing that her perception of the world in all aspects must have been skewed because she was addicted to hard drugs. It's like no one notices it, nor the fact that she was allegedly sexually abused by her own father? There aren't that many more messed up situations than this one to find yourself in. The way she saw the world and described it in her works was surely affected by that, too. This is another argument in favour of truthfullness of these plays: she described what she felt was true, what she believed was true, what she imagined was true. It’s not a lie, if it doesn’t claim to be all encompassing turth, in short: it’s not a lie, because she said so (it only works in ficiton, but luckily for us, this is fiction!).

When I speak about "multi-realities" in her plays (a term I'm borrowing from Leon Chwistek, a painter and a mathematician living roughly in the same time as Przybyszewska, they had friends in common but I'm yet to discover if they knew each other personally) I mean, actually, that there is a multi-faceted way to look into her works. Yes, historical knowledge is good for analyzing the plays from one angle, but one mustn't stop at that. There are realities aplenty: reality of love, for one, is something she described very well. She also - mostly through Robespierre, partially through Billaud and Saint-Just - reaches out to the hypothetical future and describes possible, future realities. Her characters are not thethered to one spot, what she wrote encompasses more than what we see on the pages.

I think taking a step back when analyzing her works would go a long way. Not many people on here has read Ninety-Three, her short play, but this works as a good counterexample - in The Danton Case and Thermidor we get so hung up on the point that it surely must be reality, because all the characters are given the correct historical names etc. etc. we forget they are made up. In Ninety-Three, however, we don't encounter the same problem - I am positive there was never any princess Maud de la Meuge - and thus we are automatically able to read it as a piece of fiction.

Now that I think of it, this is another reason why it's easier to analyze in regards to fictionality her plays as adaptations, and not as the raw text. It's because the directors do a lot of additional fictionalizing for us, adding even more realitites to the already full melting pot of them. We need this abundance to see for ourselves neither of these plays are historical and it’s easier to come to this conclusion when the characters are very obviously wearing costumes, or the anachronism of the stage situation becomes too apparent.

#Stanisława Przybyszewska #stanislawa przybyszewska #the danton case #sprawa dantona #thermidor #ninety-three #dziewięćdziesiąty trzeci #literary analysis #leon chwistek #idk i said a lot of words while the idea is very simple

14 notes · View notes

sprawa-przybyszewskiej · 2 years

Text

Transnationalism

One thing which I haven't seen being brought up before, is the issue of transnationalism in Przybyszewska's work. At first - while I usually try to have a less biography-oriented approach - I have to say this cannpot be discussed without knowing Przybyszewska's very peculiar personal standing in regards to belonging to a nation and a state (but I will try to keep it to a minimum).

She was born as an out-of-wedlock child in times when it was not regarded lightly. Though both her parents were artists, and her father extremely extravagant and with a reputation of a Don Juan (bad reputation, and entirely deserved) at that, it didn’t change much. Her mother, no matter how artsy and talented she was, was herself a protegee of an influential family, not to mention - a youg woman. Which means her pregnancy was not taken lightly, her protectors were disappointed in her, she had to move to Paris not only because it was one of very few places were women could potentially make it big as professional painters, but because she would not be received in her usual society at home. All of this jumpstarts Przybyszewska's life as a person uprooted and banished from her home - but it's not all, nor is the fact that despite knowing who her father was, she was not officially recognized as his daughter until her teen years.

When she was born, Poland was still partitioned, which made Przybyszewska a stateless person, a subject to Austria, but of course not regarded as a fully fledged citizen (and that's without even taking into account the first 12 years of her life, when she lived as an expat, mostly in France, with her mother). In fact, she lived in these conditions for the first 17 years of her life, which makes it exactly a half of it (she died at 34). And if this was not enough, when she lived in Poland, she spent the majority of her time in Gdańsk, which was a Free City, with two nationalities - Polish and German - flowing more or less freely (Polish on evidently becoming subdued as the war approached). Seeing as Przybyszewska wrote a good prtion of her works in German, and thought of it as a language far superior to Polish, and knowing her personal opinions on the state of Polish cultural life versus the cultural life in Europe, I'd wager to say she was never, ever someone who felt somewhere "at home".

Nationalities aside, she was also decidedly a gender non conforming person, which is its own issue (I attach a photo of her, and it should speak for itself). I'm not making any claim about her, it's just that everything in her life points to a. uprootedness, and thus b. being a foreigner in her own country/language/life/skin. (I think a bit more could also be said about Robespierre’s sexual orientation in the plays, and how it’s adding another layer of alienation, but I think I prefer to store it away for a post focused only on the love story. The most important part here is that he doesn;t even need this, something which may well have alientaed him in the real life, to be portrayed as a foreigner in his own country.)

This is interesting to me not only because it weaves itself seamlessly into what I was talking about previously, the multirealities. I think looking at her through lenses coloured with understanding just how much of a stranger she was everywhere and with everyone, we may begin to understand the way she portrayed Robespierre, most importantly in Thermidor.

Maxime is presented as someone who does not have much in common with his fellow people, and despite working, ultimately, to preserve/save the Republic, his methods seem so unorthodox he is more than once suspected of a treason, most notably in Thermidor as a whole, but also in The Danton Case, when he vehemently disagrees with arresting Danton. This last scene is important on more than one level, actually, because the suspiscion spreads to more than just having potentially erronous opinions, he is also alluded to be gay, which is a small thing (in the universum of these plays this is like the smallest thing of all one could be "charged" with), but still, it is something which deviates from the norm, putting Maxime - and anybody who follow him by proxy - outside the circle of what is considered normal and approvable.

And in Thermidor we see it on two different fronts, which are both very unlike each other, but they tend to the same goal. On the mental level, Maxime is a foreigner, because he is not even human (he's a "sterile god", as Billaud puts it), which I discussed more broadly HERE; and he was on few ocasions compared to plants, animals and objects, making him less humane as a result. He is also very far removed from his usual social circle, both in terms of mentality - his vision spans such a distance no one else can comprehend him - and physical space - he doesn't leave his rooms, when Barere relays the news, the whole Comsal is surprised to hear he has gone out to the streets. Everybody seems to perceive him as a stranger, a foreigner, an extraterrestrial being, an unwanted element not simply because his opinions are faulty (Billaud has similar ones, yes, but what is more important - Saint-Just has the very same ones, and yet the Comsal did not want to destroy him, they only wanted to destroy his friendship with Robespierre; this is very interesting to me and I will focus on this more next time). On the much more factual, physical level, though, Robespierre is a foreign element in his own Republic, because what he has undertaken is, in fact, treason:

Showing through Robespierre that the only way to move out of a stalemate is through cheating his compatriots, and without any remorse about doing so, Przybyszewska dots the is in regards to how she saw the world. Robespierre is such a singular being, that what is a treason objectively - in him is only a hidden mean to a good end. She (probably consciously; she was well aware of the grey zone she lived in and did not mind it all that much) put him outside of any ircle he might belong to, therefore all his choices are in the same time foreign and not maliscious. It's reassuring she at least showcased what happens whena being who is not foreign (Saint-Just) tries as he might to break the fence and either let the alien element in, or join it on a higher level of understanding. Of course, by showcasing it, she only underlined the point I made. This is expecially not-cliche, in my opinion, in plays focused on one of the greatest spurts of patriotism she could think of. Admiring revolutions on one hand, and admitting in the same breath they cannot be saved from within, only from without, only through means that are doubtful at best, is an interesting choice of action, not expected from someone who made it her whole life to proclaim revolution to others.

Making Robespierre become a traitor in the last, decisive stage of his life isn’t, in my opinion, an autobiographical commentary by Przybyszewska, I think it’s much more of a blind spot for her – I don’t think she thought what he has done was traitorous at all, just seen as such due to legal technicalities. It is also a bit like a disease, in that he literally contaminates Saint-Just with his thought:

Not all of them follow Maxime so easily, though, do they? (Also, a side note: in the original, Saint-Just does not speak „matter-of-factly”, he speaks „nearly with admiration”. It changes a lot, if not everything, in what he has just said.) Not all of them are as easily picked up by the wind of new ideas, because they are all too firmly rooten in th ground; Saint-Just I find to be someone on the edge between the two states, he’s way more grounded and at home in the world than Maxime, but not nearly as much as, say, Barere. Ha later admits to following Maxime „mostly” (so not in fullness), he also insists: „you are already burning in the blast furnace of your spirit. You alone.” (so he’s not sold on the idea completely, it’s more that he loves Robespierre and is ready to accept almost everything of his’ at face value). Besides – while I don’t necessarily think it should have been understood literally – there is this one small scene, laden with symbolism:

It is, of course, about death. It is also, equally, about pulling Maxime back to Earth by someone whose head is lost in the clouds a bit less often. Death fits the story all too well, because in this instant Robespierre is tempted to die, because what he has undertaken is too much, yes, but also because he miscalculated, his ideas were too lofty and otherworldy to become applicable (and! don’t even get me started! how his plan was not destroyed by someone hostile to him, but by Saint-Just, whose only crime is being too practical).

Przybyszewska’s writings are full of such creaturs, great minds who cannot 100% find their place in this world, and, more often than not, the end they meet is death. Her other French Revolution heroine, Maud de la Meuge, is the one who scarcely avoids it, by means of a concoluted (and, frankly, a little banal) plot, but the words from this play fit here very well:

Of course, no one would dare to talk to Robespierre down so, but the thought remains. And if Przybyszewska were ever able to finish Thermidor, he would have died, too, not because his story follows the original as closely as could be done in the circumstances, but because he’s doomed from the beggining by his overgrown genius.

#Stanisława Przybyszewska #stanislawa przybyszewska #Maximilien Robespierre #robespierre #maksymilian robespierre #literary analysis #frev #French Revolution #the danton case #sprawa dantona #thermidor #saint-just #antoine saint-just #ninety-three #dziewięćdziesiąty trzeci #rewolucja francuska #pollit

17 notes · View notes