Stanisław Przybyszewski - Writer and Aesthetician

Tomasz Sobieraj & Marek Wedemann

Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868 – 1927), a leading Polish modernist writer at the turn of the twentieth century, enjoyed great popularity during his lifetime in Germany, Austria, Czech, Russia and Scandinavia. He made his debut as a German-language author, belonged to the international artistic bohemia centred in Berlin, and played an outstanding role as a promoter of new literature and art. His work continues to arouse the interest of scholars. It reflects the most important dilemmas of modernist culture: the crisis of previous value systems, the undermining of the prevailing model of the individual and society, the question of new art and the subjectivity of the artist.

The authors of the book Stanisław Przybyszewski – Writer and Aesthetician are members of the Department of Positivist and Young Poland Literature at the Faculty of Polish and Classical Philology of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The chapters making up the monograph reflect the authors’ research interests. They either focus directly on Przybyszewski’s work or deal with problems related to his impact on his contemporaries, whose creative activity began during the Young Poland period. The book deals with a variety of topics, characterises Przybyszewski’s aesthetic and literary programme and worldview, shows the writer’s influence on literary life in Poland and abroad, and finally focuses on interpretations of the relationships between Przybyszewski’s works and other important phenomena in modernist literature and culture.

Marek Wedemann – in the opening chapter of the monograph, “‘I Do Not Describe’: The Role of Description in Stanisław Przybyszewski’s Aesthetic Views and Writing Practice”– comprehensively presents the writer’s multifaceted polemic against the model of mimetic aesthetics. Przybyszewski was aware of the changes that novelistic prose underwent during the modernist period and advocated the rejection of the traditional descriptiveness of the external world, which he regarded as a negative effect of the doctrine of naturalism. By rejecting the naturalistic techniques of photographic descriptiveness of reality, the novelist was originally developing the imperative formulated by Émile Zola of absolute truth and honesty in the exploration of the subject. The new novel – or, more broadly, the new art – is consistently oriented towards subjectivity, showing the world through the prism of the author’s intimate experience. Wedemann sees here a fundamental “change in the art medium.”

The second chapter of the monograph, written by the same author, is an extensive interpretation of Przybyszewski’s novel Dzieci szatana (The Children of Satan), published in 1897, clearly linked to the findings of chapter one. This novel, plotted around the destructive activities of nihilistic anarchists, was read by Wedemann as a work marked by traces of Przybyszewski’s biography, which set the action in a Polish provincial town and transformed his own experiences and historical and geographical realities into a sensational plot. This plot is dominated by imagery dominated by the morbid and hallucinatory visions of the characters.

The great convergence of Przybyszewski’s formulated poetics of drama and his work is evidenced by the one-act play Goście (The Guests), which is interpreted by Tomasz Sobieraj. The author emphasises the innovative construction of Przybyszewski’s drama. Its plot is shaped as a product of the psyche of the protagonist experiencing inner fears and remorse. The mood of this drama is reminiscent of both the poetics of Maurice Maeterlinck’s works and the conventions of expressionist drama. In The Guests, Przybyszewski depicted the metaphysical dimension of human fate marked by a mysterious crime and condemned to suffering.

Sobieraj also took up the subject of the writer’s relationship with Poznań, the largest Polish city in the Prussian partition. In 1917, his essay entitled Poznań ostoją myśli polskiej (Poznań: the Bastion of Polish Thought) was published. This work is an interesting document of Przybyszewski’s ideological consciousness at the end of the First World War. Here the author manifested his patriotism by referring to the cultural tradition of Poznań and Wielkopolska. Invoking the spiritual patronage of the great Polish romantics, Mickiewicz and Słowacki, Przybyszewski created the ideal of “fighters of the spirit,” committed to the nation, ethically impeccable and sacrificing themselves to defend the community. Przybyszewski’s essay is an example of a cultural geopoetics which, using or at least projecting the potential of place, was to ideologically influence the culture of resurging Poland.

The critical work of Karol Irzykowski (1873 – 1944) is presented as a great dialogue with Przybyszewski’s biography and oeuvre, which is discussed by Marcin Jauksz in the chapter “‘More of a Fairytale than Byronism’: Karol Irzykowski, Stanisław Przybyszewski and the Egotistic History of Interwar Period Literature.” Irzykowski’s assessment of Przybyszewski was ambiguous, but he emphasised his merits as a promoter of a breakthrough revolution in Polish literature. Jauksz’s chapter contains a characterisation of Irzykowski’s attitude to one of the leaders of Young Poland. This attitude was unabashedly benevolent in the 1920s. Irzykowski found in Przybyszewski a manifestation of uncompromising and sincere subjectivity, mostly misunderstood in the interwar period. The category of personal experience, crucial to modernist literary anthropology, links Irzykowski with Przybyszewski.

In Radosław Okulicz-Kozaryn’s chapter, Przybyszewski appears as a leading representative of modernist bohemianism and a coryphaeus of expressionism – the aesthetics of screaming. The writer and his work are here a polemical point of reference for the aesthetic-anthropological project of Roman Jaworski (1883–1944), who adopted and realised a dandyish position with refined intent. Jaworski subjected Przybyszewski’s works – the novels Synowie ziemi (Sons of the Earth) and Krzyk (The Scream) – to parodic treatments. He did this in the short story Trzecia godzina (The Third Hour) and in the novella Fanfaron (The Fanfaron), in which Przybyszewski’s key motif of screaming was “personified and shown grotesquely as an intruder.” Jaworski, as interpreted by Okulicz-Kozaryn, is a writer with a developed aesthetic consciousness, rejecting the tradition of expressionist literature and art identified with Przybyszewski in favour of an intellectualised artistic construction, which is the domain of a dandyish personality and uses the aesthetics of ugliness as an experiment.

The monograph concludes with a chapter by Rozalia Wojkiewicz devoted to the poetic cycle Witraże (Stained Glass) by Zofia Wojnarowska (1881 – 1967). This Young Poland poet practised lyricism typical of the era, but in Stained Glass she achieved originality, evident in her methods of stained-glass imagery, in which architectural, luminous and colour effects were used as correlates of the human psyche. In the expressionistic motifs of Wojnarowska’s cycle, one can find traces of inspiration from Przybyszewski, who, as is well known, was fascinated by the Middle Ages and the symbolism of the cathedral.

What emerges from the book is a complex and intricate portrait of Przybyszewski as a writer who was fully aware of the nature of the changes that were taking place in European art and literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. As the authors of the monograph demonstrate, Przybyszewski was a co-creator of these changes; in his works he rejected established literary conventions, reached for innovative poetics, gave expression to stormy ideological and worldview conflicts and the dilemmas of the modern human condition. All of this determined the different ways and degrees to which his work and aesthetic thought influenced other artists of the time, including those who did not always share his concept of the “new art” or who made proposals in opposition to it.

Tomasz Sobieraj, Marek Wedemann

Marek Wedemann