BEGIN:VCALENDAR
PRODID://WordPress//Event-Post-V5.9.2//EN
VERSION:2.0
BEGIN:VTIMEZONE
TZID:Europe/Warsaw
BEGIN:DAYLIGHT
TZOFFSETFROM:+0100
TZOFFSETTO:+0200
DTSTART:19700329T020000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=3
END:DAYLIGHT
BEGIN:STANDARD
TZOFFSETFROM:+0200
TZOFFSETTO:+0100
TZNAME:CET
DTSTART:19701025T030000
RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=-1SU;BYMONTH=10
END:STANDARD
END:VTIMEZONE
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Playwrights 1 — Fredro, Wyspiański, and Przybyszewski – Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature
UID:https://instytutpolski.pl/newyork/2026/06/18/playwrights-1-fredro-wyspianski-and-przybyszewski-encounters-with-polish-and-ukrainian-literature/
LOCATION:
DTSTAMP:20260701
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20260701
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Warsaw:20260831
DESCRIPTION:S6E7 and all video recordings are available on our YouTube.
Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature is a video series for
anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each
month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with
an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More
about the Encounters with Polish and Ukrainian Literature series and the
timeline.
This episode marks the beginning of a new mini-series within “Encounters
with Polish and Ukrainian Literature” focusing on drama and playwrights.
As a way into this topic, we are going to look at three plays structured
around the marriage plot.
Aleksander Fredro (1793-1876) is often associated with the Romantics,
because he lived and wrote comedies for the stage during the era of
Romanticism, but he was really an anti-Romantic closer to Enlightenment or
even Baroque playwrights like Molière, Goldoni, or Beaumarchais than to
his contemporaries, Mickiewicz and Słowacki. He was a member of the
szlachta or Polish gentry, who fought under Napoleon and traveled
extensively, but did not emigrate like the more well-known Polish writers
of his era. His travels exposed him to the European theater and commedia
dell’arte, but he had resources and no reason to leave his home country.
Stanisław Wyspiański (1869-1907), the son of a sculptor, was a dramatist,
writer, and painter and one of the co-founders of the modernist movement
known as “Młoda Polska” or “Young Poland” at the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a multimedia artist, he was a
theatrical maximalist conceiving of monumental works in the mode of the
Polish Romantics and Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of
art” encompassing the language and action of drama along with music; the
visual aspects of set design, costumes, and lighting; reality, myth, and
folklore; and blurring the line between the theater and the outside world.
Wyspiański is often regarded as the founder of the modern Polish theater.
Stanisław Przybyszewski (1868-1927) was an expressionist novelist,
essayist, poet, and dramatist, very popular in his day, publishing in
Russian and German as well as Polish, and translated into English in his
own time. His idea of the “naked soul”—the essential kernel of
personal identity—would figure in important ways into the thought of many
thinkers and avantgarde prose writers of the 1930s, and he brought
eroticism to the surface in ways that would also become important during
the interwar period of free Poland. He was close to painter, Edward Munch
and even claimed to have proposed the title for Munch’s most famous
painting, “The Scream” and was involved in a love triangle with Munch
and poet and translator Dagny Juel, whom he married.
In this episode we look at Fredro’s Maidens’ Vows: Or the Magnetism of
the Heart as the classical wedding play, in which all the right people get
married, and the marriage solves the problems of the work, which reflect
the problems of society. Wyspiański’s The Wedding is a work that
combines fantastical elements from folklore with an actual wedding attended
by the author, and embodies central themes in Polish culture such as the
division between the peasants and the nobles or alternately the country and
the city, which must be resolved in order to resurrect the nation in the
time of the partitions. Przybyszewski’s Snow mirrors the structure of
Fredro’s work at first but takes some bizarre turns with the formation of
unexpected love triangles and ends in tragedy rather than resolution.
Fredro, Wyspiański, and Przybyszewski, selected dramas in English
translation:
Alexander Fredro. The Major Comedies of Alexander Fredro. Tr. with intro.
and commentary by Harold B. Segel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1969. 
Stanisław Przybyszewski. Snow. Tr. O.F. Theis. New York: Nicholas L.
Brown, 1920. 
Stanisław Wyspiański. Meleager: A Tragedy. Tr. Florence and George Rapall
Noyes. Berkeley, Cal.: University of California Press, 1933. (Check your
local research or university library or try interlibrary loan)
Stanisław Wyspiański. The Wedding. Tr. Noel Clark. Intro. by Jerzy
Peterkiewicz. London: Oberon Books, 1998. 
Benjamin Paloff chairs the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
at the University of Michigan, where he is also Professor of Comparative
Literature and a faculty affiliate of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies
and the Copernicus Center for Polish Studies. His most recent books are
Worlds Apart: Genre and the Ethics of Representing Camps, Ghettos, and
Besieged Cities (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Bakhtin's Adventure:
An Essay on Life without Meaning (Northwestern University Press, 2025); vs
Computer, his third collection of poems, is forthcoming in 2026. He has
translated about a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical
texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works by Dorota
Masłowska, Marek Bieńczyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has
received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows,
Stanford Humanities Center, and National Endowment for the Arts, among
others.
David A. Goldfarb, Host & ProducerBartek Remisko, Curator and Executive
ProducerNatalia Iyudin, Produce
Image:
Fredro and Wyspiański from © Wikimedia Commons. Przybyszewski by ©
Edward Munch, 1895, Munchmuseet.Benjamin Paloff at Iwaszkiewicz's Desk at
Twórczoś, photo credit © Darek Foks, 2025
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR